The North American shale boom owes its success to the hydraulic fracking techniques that unlocked previously inaccessible hydrocarbons.
And successful fracking depends on proppant — in most cases quartz sand, which is suspended in water and chemical solutions and pumped into the fractured formation.
While exploration and production companies have been fracking for decades, the practice has increased exponentially in the unconventional gas rush — as has consumption of frac sand.
