Back To The Concern Over Mining in Minnesota

The following was sent in by a reader. If a citation or credit for the note is desired, I will do that. But again, this is from a reader:

As indicated by the number of bars to the left, I have tried to amuse a few others, from doctor to dog catcher, this day and I expect the article you currently link to, on Minnesota lawmakers taking up silica sand mining . . . may be your first exposure, also, to "silica sand" but, hopefully, not our last to either silica or sand.

For verification that this usage is actually the ridiculous redundancy I presumed it to be I did some mining.

I found that the compound known as silica occurs naturally as quartz, the granular form of which is sand. That it is, after oxygen, the second most abundant component of the earth's crust. That it is actually a compound of oxygen and silicon (silicon dioxide). And, thus allied with oxygen, it is present in 90% of the minerals in the earth's crust.

One can fairly say silica is as common as the air we breath. That is not to say it would be a safe component of the air we breath. The intentional penning of a redundancy such as "silica sand" has the effect of marking sand with a skull and crossbones by exploiting the association of silica with a disease that already has a label. That would be silicosis. Danger! A potentially fatal disease could be as near as the air you breath and the ground you walk on. Now you really have something to keep you awake nights! Sand is everywhere.

Danger thus lurks in a trip to the beach. At the gulf course. You'll want to stay well clear of Silicon valley, where there are sure to be high concentrations. Sand is in the dust we raise while jogging, tilling our fields or working in the garden. In the truckloads of gravel and sand we encounter on our roadways. Heaven forbid that we allow them to actually spread it on the roads themselves, on ice-slickened highways (or that we ourselves should actually put it in a box for our children to play in). Or in powdered foods and drugs we consume or cosmetics we apply (makes them flowable).

Surely it's not that sand mining or sand itself was suddenly rendered dangerous by the newfound use for it (to prop open the artificially created fractures in oil-bearing rock formations through a process called hydraulic fracturing).

Let's see the call for a moratorium on mining sand for what it is. ---- An absurd extension of a radical, irrational assault on the economy, on the oil industry generally and "fracking" in particular. The "frackers" were already importing sand from China where it was both found naturally and being manufactured to their specifications before domestic deposits and suppliers could rise and meet the sudden demand.

Environmentalists, indeed! It's as if, in their time zone, dust masks have yet to be invented. How much more would they really be willing to see added to the price of oil and gasoline, batteries, electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines, or for the services and all the other products we use and need every day, as a result of compliance with their demands? How much energy would be wasted, unnecessarily consumed, to transport sand from China to American oil and gas fields, when there are ample deposits of the desired grade of this second most abundant mineral on earth in far closer and even direct proximity to the fields where needed?

I do believe a Minnesota icon, 3M, is "Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing.