Butler County’s resources fuel industries and show no signs of slowing
As we walk around in our day-to-day lives in Butler County, below our feet, sometimes miles or just below the surface, there are a handful of raw materials just waiting to be plucked from the earth and turned into something useful.
According to Patrick Burkhart, a professor of geology at Slippery Rock University, Butler County and Western Pennsylvania are “blessed with an array of rich resources” such as coal, limestone, sand, gravel and natural gas among others that have been being used for hundreds of years.
Burkhart said it all starts with coal, which has been part of our industrial heritage for a long time and has been the driving force behind many early industries in our region such as glass and steel.
“That is one of the three ingredients that goes into a blast furnace to make steel,” Burkhart said. “So our coal resources have been a blessing to anything that requires heat.”
Butler County also is home to large deposits of limestone, which can be used in a variety of ways and in industries such as agriculture and construction.
“It is key in manufacturing cement and concrete,” Burkhart said of limestone. “It’s also useful as a crushed stone like you have seen in a parking lot. It becomes easy to crush and grind.”
When ground to a fine powderlike material, Burkhart said, limestone also can be used as a soil enhancer.
Burkhart said where there is limestone there also is coal, so companies often will mine both. But due to government regulations and permits needed to mine these materials, a company would prefer to be classified as a limestone quarry, as regulations are much less-restrictive.
If a company claims 10%, or more, of its sales come from coal, it also must adhere to coal mining regulations as well.
“It’s a valuable byproduct,” Burkhart said of coal in limestone operations. “They will keep stockpiles of it and only bleed it into the market as 9.5% of sales so they don’t encounter coal regulations on top of limestone regulations.”
Acquiring permits is the biggest challenge faced in mining in Pennsylvania, according to Mark McClymonds, president of West Penn Aggregates, which specializes in supplying aggregate and landscape products such as coal, decorative stone, gravel, limestone and mulch in Western Pennsylvania.
“It’s just a matter of going through the process,” McClymonds said. “To get a permit it can take a year or two before you can start working.”
McClymonds said rising costs also have been a challenge in recent years, but it hasn’t slowed production in any fashion.
“Costs are up 30% or better,” McClymonds said. “Labor is up, equipment is up, health care is up. You just have to increase prices. People don’t buy it because it’s a bargain, they buy it because they need it.”
Burkhart said sand and gravel are versatile resources found in our region, and residents can often see all these operations taking place along Interstate 79 between Slippery Rock and Zelienople.
“Sand and gravel go into everything,” Burkhart said. “It goes into brick making, asphalt, concrete and cinder blocks. If you watch a new road getting made, they move large quantities of sand and gravel.”
Burkhart said our region’s ground is like a cake. The top layer consists of sand and gravel. Below that is limestone, and below that is coal. But below all of that is the most valuable of them all, natural gas.
“In our bedrock we also have black shales,” Burkhart said. “Like the Marcellus Shale, those are source rocks for natural gas. Butler County is a producer of what is called unconventional natural gas.”
Unconventional refers to natural gas that requires advanced production methods.
“Hydrofracking is really a marvel of human ingenuity that we can get the natural gas out of those tight shales,” Burkhart said. “First you drill down, which in Pennsylvania that's between 5,000 to 7,000 feet. Then their technology allows them to turn the bore hole from vertical to horizontal.”
Then once the drilling is complete, workers will put a steel casing inside and use “directional explosives,” which is a technology originally designed to blow the armor off military tanks.
“It’s a technology developed for the battlefield that is then unleashed in the deep subsurface to basically blow explosives into the shale,” Burkhart said. “Then the hydrofracking occurs where fluid is injected at high pressure. That fluid includes the suspended sand, so it gets in there and wedges between the rock to allow the gas to flow when the fracking is done.”
While materials such as natural gas and coal get all the headlines, there is one last resource below our feet that has use for a specific purpose.
In Butler County and other areas in the region is a material called “Pittsburgh red bed clay” which is used by 26 of the 30 Major League Baseball teams for their infield dirt mix.
The company that mines this clay is DuraEdge, previously known as Natural Sand Company. DuraEdge extracts the material from a mine in Buffalo Township, and then ships it to its processing facility in the Slippery Rock area, where it is ground and mixed with sand.
“For the infield skin we have three products, classic, collegiate and professional,” said Kurt Mershimer, executive vice president of project management with DuraEdge. “They mix with different ratios of the red bed and sand. As we go to the pro teams, it has a higher ratio of clay than the lower ones.”
Mershimer said major league teams use a mix that is 40% clay and 60% sand, while Little League Baseball fields use a ratio of 30% clay and 70% sand.
“The Little Leagues don’t have the manpower and water to take care of the field like a professional team can,” Mershimer said. “We sell them a material that is easier to maintain and has more sand in it.”
The red bed clay is preferred by major league teams because it is sticky once wet and it takes a fair amount of water to make the clay sticky. That is why major league teams use the higher clay ratio mix because they have the money to water the field on a regular basis while Little League teams most likely don’t.
“What we do is we strip off the material that is not clay called overburden,” Mershimer said. “Like topsoil, sandstone and a little of limestone. The clay is found from 10 feet below the ground, down to about 60 or 80 feet.”
During the mixing process with sand, it is key to not let the clay get wet until it is mixed with water, otherwise it will not process correctly because of how sticky it is.
“Once you blend it with sand something magical happens,” Mershimer said. “There are small-sized sand particles and with those there is enough to hold it together, but not too much to where it packs together like concrete. Then it is loose enough to let the water pass through.”
Mershimer said DuraEdge harvests about 20,000 tons of clay a year and is looking to expand its operation with a new mining permit on land it owns, but like other mining operations such as coal, the permitting process can take a fair amount of time.
“You have to own the property, but then you have to permit it,” Mershimer said. “We are locking down for our reserves that should last 20 years.”
When it comes to all of these resources found in Butler County and Western Pennsylvania, Burkhart said he is confident that there will be plenty to go around for the coming generations.
“There is little concern we will run out of these for generations to come,” Burkhart said. “We are blessed with substantial riches, and Butler County is well-positioned in these regards for the foreseeable future.”
This article first appeared in the September edition of Butler County Business Matters.
