Minnesota May Have The Frac Sand Needed for The Bakken -- North Dakota, USA

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RED WING, Minn. - Near the muddy banks of Hay Creek, a popular trout stream, are significant bluffs covered with a hardwood forest of oak, bass wood and black cherry trees.

Underneath the forested land is an increasingly valuable resource called "frac sand," highly sought after for its size and strength. With perfectly round grains that look like brown sugar crystals, the sand is ideal for the oil and natural gas exploration industry, which uses it to extract fuel from underground rock in a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

An increasing number of companies are eying Minnesota for the valuable sand, which geologists say is buried in virtually unlimited amounts deep beneath the bluffs that straddle the Mississippi River in southeastern Minnesota.

WWindsor Permian, a division of Oklahoma-based Windsor Energy, bought 155 acres near Red Wing for $2.6 million earlier this year.