01 SEPTEMBER 2011chron.com
Company announces plans to expand in Bauxite
Edited by : AL CIRCLE
1 min read
The demand by oil and natural gas drillers for tiny ceramic particles led to an announcement Wednesday that a company plans to spend $100 million on a new factory in Saline County and to hire 140 new workers.
Saint-Gobain Corp. already makes the material at a plant in Fort Smith but needs a new factory so it can fill expanding orders, company officials said.
The particles, known as proppants, are about the size of a grain of sand and are used to prop open fractures in rock during oil and natural gas extraction, a process known as fracking.
Sand is also used in the fracking process, but for deeper wells, such as in the Haynesville Shale in north Louisiana, the harder ceramic proppants are more efficient for sustaining the gaps in the fractured rock.
The primary material in the ceramic particles is bauxite, which is abundant in Saline County and which fueled earlier economic growth when Reynolds and Alcoa had a significant presence in the community. People driving to the announcement from the west could see a large, open-pit bauxite mine on the north side of Arkansas 183 standing out amid the pine groves and flourishing kudzu.
Saint-Gobain Corp. already makes the material at a plant in Fort Smith but needs a new factory so it can fill expanding orders, company officials said.
The particles, known as proppants, are about the size of a grain of sand and are used to prop open fractures in rock during oil and natural gas extraction, a process known as fracking.
Sand is also used in the fracking process, but for deeper wells, such as in the Haynesville Shale in north Louisiana, the harder ceramic proppants are more efficient for sustaining the gaps in the fractured rock.
The primary material in the ceramic particles is bauxite, which is abundant in Saline County and which fueled earlier economic growth when Reynolds and Alcoa had a significant presence in the community. People driving to the announcement from the west could see a large, open-pit bauxite mine on the north side of Arkansas 183 standing out amid the pine groves and flourishing kudzu.
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