MADISON, Wis. – The Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to consider a Georgia company’s plan to dig up wetlands near Warrens in Monroe County for a frac sand mine. In effect, the Court killed a state Natural Resources Department license for the mine. The Georgia company, Meteor Timber of Atlanta, appears to have no recourse now for its plan to extract frac sand from 16 acres of pristine forested wetlands and to ship it 45 miles, either by truck or rail, to a Taylor processing plnt. The plan had been opposed from the start by the Ho-Chunk Nation, Midwest Environmental Advocates, and the Clean Wisconsin environmental-protection group
Verbatim
Evan Feinauer of Clean Wisconsin: “This is a permit that never should have been issued in the first place. This company’s application to fill valuable wetlands did not meet the standards that every other business and individual must meet. Meteor Timber obviously knew this, because it sought to have special legislation pushed through without notice or debate that would have exempted its project from the permitting process altogether. Fortunately, that effort failed. Permits to impact natural resources should only be issued when rigorous standards are met, and not because a business has powerful and well-connected lobbyists.”
What is fracking?
“Frac sand” is used in the hydraulic fracturing process in oil-drilling. The sand is high-purity quartz valued for its tiny round grains. The grains are crush-resistant. They can be forced hydraulically into tight rock formations to cracks open subterraneous deposits of oil. This otherwise would be too costly to extract from rock formations that are insufficiently porous for fluids to flow. The drilling process is controversial. It has been linked toi earthquakes in non-quake areas, notably in Oklahoma and Texas. The best frac sand is in natural formations in Wisconsin. Illinois and Minnesota — far from any oil fields. The sands sands are railed to southern and off-shore U.S oil zones, as well as Alberta, Manitoba and the Dakotas. Not only is the hydraulic fracking controversial, so too is the mining of frac sand itself. Massive open-pit mines leave the landscape barren and pocked. In Minnesota, Winona County, which is rich with the sand, the practice has been banned. The courts have been upheld the Winona ban. In Wisconsin, however, notably in Jackson and Trempealeau counties, thousands of acres have been left scarred by frac-sand mining.