An Alberta miner's proposal to drill 7,200 wells near Winnipeg has rural residents on edge

An Alberta mining company wants to drill thousands of wells in southeastern Manitoba to remove millions of tonnes of sand in an aquifer that serves as the source of drinking water for tens of thousands of people.

Calgary-based Sio Silica is seeking provincial environmental approval to drill up to 7,200 wells to the east and southeast of Winnipeg over 24 years and extract up to 33 million tonnes of ultra-pure silica sand from about 50 metres below the surface.

The mining company says its proposal will inject billions of dollars into the Manitoba economy by tapping into a Canadian supply of a highly sought after raw material required for the production of solar panels, new batteries and semiconductors. 

Hundreds of residents of southeastern Manitoba, however, fear the potential contamination of their drinking water by a mining process that's never been tried on this scale anywhere on Earth.

The commodity coveted by Sio Silica is ultrapure crystalline quartz, which is 99.85 per cent free of contaminants such as boron, thorium, uranium and other elements that diminish the industrial value of silica.

"That sand is not easily obtainable around the world. The deposit in Manitoba is probably the largest high-purity, scalable deposit in the world," said Brent Bullen, Sio Silica's chief operating officer, during a visit to Winnipeg earlier in May.

A veteran mining industry executive who's worked in Canada, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, Russia, Germany and Poland, Bullen said Sio Silica originally came to Manitoba in search of "frac sand" for use in horizontal oil drilling. 

The company changed tack, he said, when it realized a vast quantity of critical minerals lies within a geological formation called the Winnipeg Sandstone Aquifer.

Sio Silica proceeded to buy up subsurface mineral claims, mostly in an arc of land east of Winnipeg, where the sandstone aquifer is close enough to the surface to be reached by drilling conventional 16-inch-wide wells — yet still far enough below ground, the company claims, to prevent the surface from collapsing after sand is sucked out below.

In documents filed with the Clean Environment Commission (CEC), Manitoba's environmental regulator, Sio Silica intends to drill about 300 wells a year in Manitoba.

By injecting air into the pipe, sand would be extracted from each well for five to seven days. Outside the well, a slurry of sand and water would be piped to a processing facility planned for a former patch of forest south of Vivian, Man., in the Rural Municipality of Springfield, about 50 kilometres due east of Portage & Main.

Sio Silica's plan calls for the sand to be purified further at the processing plant and then shipped by rail to customers. Excess water would be cleaned and piped back underground.

Bullen calls the process "sustainable mining" and insists it will have no noticeable effect on the environment, unlike surface mining for lower-grade silica, which can leave scars behind on the surface and beaches bereft of sand.

Experts in geology, hydrology and water chemistry hired by the CEC are less enthused.