This sand is your sand or my sand?
By Daniel Arens
One rural road in Mercer County could see an influx of over 100 semi trucks a day in the near future.
That’s if an ambitious proposal for mining and processing proppant sand from sand dunes in the county moves forward. The project could potentially bring lots of revenue to the area, including offsetting some of the losses due to energy sector slowdown.
But the project could also potentially have a huge impact on country residents living near the sites. And the Mercer County Planning and Zoning Board wants to balance the economic and residential impacts before moving forward with the proposal.
At a packed planning and zoning board meeting last Thursday evening at the Beulah Civic Center, representatives of Asgard Resources LLC spoke about their plan to extract sand from dunes in the county for use in the hydraulic fracking process in the Bakken oil fields. Residents also expressed their concerns to these representatives.
