[Vision2020] Banned uses in the Groundwater Protection Zone Part 1

[Phil Nisbet]

Mark,

The clay deposits are part of the Sediment of Bovill member of the Latah 
Formation, as thin individual horizons within a series of thicker sands and 
gravel layers.  The complete sequence is over three hundred feet thick.  The 
only clay unit with a thickness to be of interest as a continuous possibly 
minable unit is the Rogers Horizon and it is within the lower portions of 
the Sediment of Bovill.  That is why there is an overburden problem, there 
are not only 5-50 feet of Palouse Formation loess deposits over the top of 
the Rogers Horizon, but also major thicknesses of sand and gravel.

At water table levels, there are four distinct aquifers associated with the 
Sediment of Bovill, each separated by thinner clay horizons and flowing in 
sand and gravel channel deposits with variable clay contents.  Those 
individual water bearing units have flows between 1-30 gallons per minute.  
They are all contained in the lower 150 feet of the Sediment of Bovill.

It is in the upper portion of those sediments, and specifically in the hill 
slope areas on the small stranded Palouse hills, where overburden is a thin 
layer of 1-5 feet of over washed Palouse, that possible sand and gravel 
deposits with low potential overburden occurs.  Because those upper portions 
of the Sediment of Bovill are above the water table and are on small hills, 
stranded and not continuous with the rest of the sedimentary package, they 
are not part of the aquifer system.

Yes, clay sells for significant amounts higher in value than sand and 
gravel, but the processing costs for clay are also significantly higher.  
Clay requires lots of water and very long periods of settling time and 
drying using natural gas.  You can recycle water from a clay operation, but 
you require a very large area for dewatering and a very long dwell time to 
get the extreme fines out of the water for re-use.  So clay has a milling 
cost in the tens of dollars per ton.

Processing sand and gravel, on the other hand, can easily recycle water, 
because water flows pretty easily from a sandy material or coarser gravels.  
You may not be aware of it, but the crushed rock operators are producing 
water washed basalt gravel as we speak just off the Moscow Pullman Highway.  
Instead of dwelling in a settling pond for weeks, water separates from sand 
and gravel in hours and can then be sent back into the processes loop to 
wash another batch.  Because of this, sand and gravel costs a couple of 
dollars a ton to ‘mill’, an order of magnitude lower in costs than 
processing clay.

A clay processing plant costs millions to tens of millions of dollars.  It 
has to have an array of water removal equipment and air quality equipment 
and other things that are simply not required in sand and gravel plants.  
This compares to several hundred thousand dollars for the typical sand and 
gravel water washing plant.  You can view one of those right here in town, 
because Moscow happens to be a major producer of them and sells sand and 
gravel plants made right here on the Palouse literally all over the world.

So it would only take about 3-4 million gallons of water to process all of 
the areas 250,000 ton sand and gravel needs annually.  That same amount of 
water would only handle 1-2 thousand tons of clay.  It’s half the water that 
the new playing fields that the City of Moscow intends to build will use and 
a tenth of the requirements for WSU’s new golf course.

And its not that I am interested in this from a company stand point, Mark.  
It’s a small sand and gravel operation and what is referred to in the Mining 
Industry as a Mom and Pop type of operation that a small local company 
without a big overhead would even want to run.

What I see is an opportunity for a small local firm to wash sand and gravel 
and employee 10-20 local guys at real living wages.  I also see a way to 
save the community a couple of million dollars that are simply spent 
trucking a commodity to us that we could be producing here.  Without that 
trucking cost, we would also eliminate the need for 500,000 gallons of 
fossil fuel being burned annually, which not only saves that cost, but 
conserves energy resource and reduces Greenhouse Gas emissions.

And I am not suggesting to you that there are specific sites that are 
currently feasible, just that there are a number of locations in the 
Groundwater Overlay Zone that might have the potential to be used in this 
manner.  There would of course have to be testing and drilling and the rest 
to establish the merits of any sand and gravel deposits in the upper 
Sediment of Bovill and further to evaluate any impacts that working in them 
may have.  But if we ban all mineral activity, that will never be 
established and no effort will be undertaken to look at it.

By allowing conditional use for minerals activity that is non-groundwater 
disturbing and setting the requirements for establishing the proofs needed 
to get such a permit, we can get both the potential for additional data 
needed to figure out how the groundwater recharge zone works and possibly 
establish workable zones of sands and gravels that could end up benefiting 
the community.  An outright ban may make it easier to draft legislation, but 
we are giving something of substance up by not taking the time to write a 
better and more complex ordinance.  Saving a couple million dollars in 
community commodity costs, a half million gallons in fuel and putting some 
local guys to work at the same time, seems to me worth taking the time to 
write some code for.

Phil Nisbet

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