Hill Country Town Picks Up Pieces After Sand Plants Head West
Texas’ oil and gas industry is seeing a boom — thanks in large part to the relatively new oil-drilling method called fracking. Late last year, Texas oil helped push the country to become the largest producer of crude in the world. Around the same time, however, the boom came to an end for one town in the Hill Country.
If you follow State Highway 71 west, it ends in Brady, a town of about 6,000 people in McCulloch County. The stretch of Hill Country has a unique geology.
“Sand goes back a long, long way here in Brady,” Mayor Anthony Groves says. “I had cousins that worked in the sand plant in the ’50s and ’60s timeframe, so sand plants have been here for a long, long time.”
The sand here has a nickname in the oil industry: Brady Brown. It’s had many uses over the years, but mining operations were turned up a few notches when fracking came into vogue. Sand — good sand — is an essential ingredient for the technique.
Read more: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2019/02/05/320578/hill-country-town-picks-up-pieces-after-sand-plants-head-west/