FEATURE: Meeting the Demand for Frac Sand – Quarry Near Prince George to Produce Sand for Fracking

While most prospectors in B.C. chase gold, copper and critical minerals, a B.C. company called Vitreo Minerals is looking to mine sand north of Prince George. Or more precisely, quartz arenite (sandstone).

Vitreo’s proposed $300 million Angus project is an industry being directly induced by B.C.’s growing LNG and natural gas sectors.

It is focused on a single market: making frac sand for hydraulic fracturing in the Montney formation of northeast B.C.

While it may not be as sexy or exotic as lithium or niobium mining, quartz mining in B.C. has some pretty strong economic fundamentals, including low capex costs and high demand.

“The oil and gas sector demand, just in this one basin – just in the Montney – is massive,” said Scott Broughton, president of Vitreo Minerals.

A boost for blue-collar jobs

A mining engineer who has headed a number of junior mining companies and served as chairman of the Mining Association of B.C., Broughton recently relocated from the Sunshine Coast to Prince George to work on the Angus project.

The project would create 150 jobs during construction and 140 in ongoing operations, giving a region that has been hard hit by the decline in forestry a much needed boost in blue collar jobs.

“We’ve geared a lot of that — at least 75% of it — towards contractors who could be with indigenous nations or local contractors,” Broughton said.

Another 150 workers, mostly truck drivers, would be employed in delivering the sand to northeastern B.C.

One of the First Nations companies in the region that will benefit from the project is Duz Cho – a heavy civil earthworks operator owned by the McLeod Lake Indian Band.

Duz Cho CEO Jacob Albertson said he expects to see 20 to 25 new jobs for Duz Cho workers and contractors from the Angus project.

“We’re super excited for this project,” Albertson said. “This is very welcome for the region for sure – for Prince George, Mackenzie. This is something that needs to come.”

The geology of fracking

A typical fracking operation requires 5,000 to 8,000 tonnes of sand. The sand is mixed with water and chemicals to create a “proppant” that is pumped into wellbores under high pressure, fracturing the shale rock to release oil and gas contained in the rock.

Not just any sand will do. The grains need to be the right size and shape. Broughton said the geology of the Angus project is quite “pure” – about 98% to 99% silica.

“The grains of sands in this sandstone are the perfect sizes for what wants to be used in the frac sand world,” Broughton said.

Broughton said an estimated 7 million tonnes of frac sand were used in well completions in 2025. Increased upstream drilling, driven by the demand from LNG, is expected to increase that to about 15 million tonnes by 2030.

Minimizing disturbance

The Angus project would produce 2 million tonnes of product annually.

Currently, most of the frac sand used in the B.C. Montney comes from Wisconsin, Broughton said, and sells for about $220 to $225 per tonne.

“It pretty quickly adds up to a captive market in the Montney of around $2 billion a year,” Broughton said.

The Angus project is located 60 kilometers north of Prince George. It would be an open-pit quarry operation with two processing facilities: a raw sand plant and a finishing plant located near Highway 97.

The project is located in an area that was previously logged.

“We’ve geared all of our development around existing disturbances related to forestry,” Broughton said.

“We’re not building any new roads. We’re making use of existing clear-cut sites for our plants – just really, really trying hard to minimize the initial disturbance here.”

The road to Silica Valley

Broughton has been trying to develop a new frac sand quarry in B.C. for a couple of decades now.

Seeing the growth of the natural gas industry in B.C., and the increased shift from conventional drilling to hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, Broughton started a company in 2005 to explore for good sandstone.

At that time, much of the upstream activity was focused in the Horne River Basin in the Fort Nelson area. It later shifted south to the Montney formation.

“Our story was really too early at that time,” Broughton said. “The promise of LNG and development of gas supply from B.C. — it took a lot of extra time.”

He later resumed prospecting for deposits in B.C. and ultimately settled on redeveloping the Moberly silica mine in Golden B.C.

The Moberly operation originally produced sand for ceramics, and the plan was to pivot to frac sand through a company called Northern Silica. Initially, the intended market was the Duvernay formation in Alberta.

An investment was made at the Moberly operation, but the timing was off for that venture, and the company, Northern Silica, went bust.

“The whole frac sand market around Red Deer and Duvernay basin kind of collapsed,” Broughton said. “Then we had the pandemic.”

Northern Silica was forced to seek creditor protection. It was restructured into Vitreo Minerals, which turned its focus to a project closer to the Montney formation, where the demand for sand is growing.

Vitreo acquired the Angus property and mineral claims from Corus Exploration Corp. (CEC).

“The Montney has proven to be really prolific, in terms of the quality of the gas, but also the liquids that are generated there,” Broughton said.

“What we’ve seen is an evolution that trends from lots of development in Alberta into quite a bit more focus and opportunity – capital investment – in the British Columbia side of the Montney.”

The company still owns the Moberly plant near Golden, which is being used for processing trials for the Angus project.

As for financing the Angus project, Broughton said the company has a private equity backer in Australia that will provide the startup capital.

“We have a shareholder based in Sydney Australia,” Broughton said. “We’re involved at Moberly – the operation in Golden. We’ve morphed the idea and vision into the Angus project as being our flagship.”

The Angus project entered the BC Environmental Assessment process in 2023. Broughton is hoping for certificate and permit approvals later this year.