Sand Dollars

BUD BRIGHAM made a fortune drilling for oil, but his 42-mile-long conveyor belt of sand for fracking could make him a billionaire-assuming he can avoid the tiny lizards.

- Chris Helman

Growing up in Midland, Texas, there wasn’t a lot to do, Bud Brigham says. “We used to sled on the dunes—using a cardboard box. If you were really fancy you made a sled, put laminate on the bottom and waxed it.” Fifty years later, you can still sled the giant sand dunes at Monahans State Park. If you’re lucky you might spot a threatened three-inch dunes sagebrush lizard skittering amid the shinnery oak bushes.

What you will see for sure is sand trucks. Lots of them. Brigham’s company, Atlas Energy Solutions, fills up to 1,200 trucks a day, each with 24 tons of sand destined for oil fracking operations. Brigham’s no longer playing on the dunes; instead, he’s digging them up—to the tune of 10 million tons a year.

At the heart of Atlas’ mine in bone-dry Kermit, Texas, is the incongruous sight of a 50-acre blue lagoon, where barges dredge the sand, sucking it up through hoses. It goes through cleaners, dryers and screens, then into tall silos for loading into trucks.

The sand doesn’t have far to go. For hundreds of miles around Kermit, the landscape, known as the Permian Basin, is dotted with thousands of oil-and-gas wells, with dozens of new ones being fracked every day. You cannot frack without sand—and you need preposterous amounts of it, on the order of 10,000 tons per well. At the drilling site that sand is mixed with water, then injec ted at high pressure into the wellbore (often three miles down, then two or more miles horizontally). This subterranean blasting, Brigham explains, “props open fissures to let the oil and gas out.”