How and where sand is mined in Russia. What is sand, methods of its extraction and application Open pit mining

Exhaustible resources are not just hydrocarbons, forests or fresh water. Scientists say that the earth is facing a shortage of sand: demand for it is growing rapidly, and reserves are dwindling.

SERGEY MANUKOV

Many or few

As a child, sitting on cloudless evenings on the seashore and looking at the sky strewn with myriads of stars, many wondered: what is more - stars or grains of sand? It is, of course, impossible to accurately count both of them; all calculations are very, very approximate.

Scientists from the University of Hawaii recently tried to count grains of sand. If we assume that the average grain of sand has a certain size, then we can count how many of them will fit, for example, in a teaspoon, and then try to count all the beaches, banks of rivers and lakes, and deserts too. As a result of very complex and troublesome calculations, American scientists found that there are, of course, approximately 7.5 x 10 18 grains of sand on Earth.

The number of stars, unlike grains of sand, has not decreased in recent years, but has been growing thanks to the achievements of astronomers and the work of space telescopes like Hubble, which are discovering more and more new space objects. Also, of course, a very rough approximation gives 7x10 22 stars. It turns out that for every grain of sand there are about 10 thousand stars. Is it a lot or a little? Of course, everything is relative. Ten drops of water contain as many H2O molecules as there are stars in the sky. There are approximately the same number of nitrogen and oxygen molecules in just a quarter cubic centimeter of air at normal temperature and pressure!

On the one hand, 7.5 quintillion grains of sand is a lot, but, on the other hand, if we talk about the balance of supply and demand for sand, then this balance tends to be negative.

“The demand for sand is growing rapidly and the supply is increasingly limited,” explains Jianguo Liu, director of the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainable Development at Michigan State University. “This imbalance will have very dire consequences for both the environment and humanity as a whole and for the global economy. The problem did not arise yesterday, but every year it becomes more serious and acute due to the rapid development of different regions of the planet. Industrialization and urbanization are all dramatically increasing the demand for sand.”

Jianguo Liu knows what he's talking about. He is one of the authors of a large September article on the topic. The fact that the upcoming sand shortage should be taken very seriously is eloquently indicated by the fact that a disappointing forecast was published by such an authoritative journal in the scientific world as Science, which is very demanding about published materials.

The sand is running out

The vast majority of people, when talking about limited natural resources, mention fossil fuels, trees and fresh water. Today, Jianguo Liu is sure, one more resource should be added to this list - sand.

It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the modern world is built on sand: most buildings and structures are made of concrete, which consists mainly of sand and gravel. In 2010, the construction sector alone consumed about 11 billion tons of sand. It is most mined in the Asia-Pacific region. Next come Europe and North America. Sand mining is a huge business: experts estimate it at $70 billion. In the United States alone, last year the mining of construction sand alone was worth $8.9 billion.

Over the past five years, global sand production has increased by a quarter (24%), and trade in it has increased almost sixfold over the same time!

Sand is also widely used in the production of asphalt. Between 1900 and 2010, the volume of natural resources used in buildings and transport infrastructure increased 23 times. Sand and gravel accounts for the lion's share of this growth, at 79%, or 28.6 gigatons (2010).

Glass is made from sand. It is widely used in semiconductors. Well, the most modern area of ​​its use is in hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to strengthen the walls of cracks that go to great depths in the ground. Finally, sand is indispensable in the extraction of minerals such as shale oil and gas.

Sand is found on almost the entire surface of the Earth. Since this resource is very accessible, it is not easy to keep statistics on its production. The numbers here are greatly underestimated, because not all countries keep full official statistics and records. Suffice it to say that the statistics, for example, do not include sand, which is used in shale mining and for beach restoration. Sand is superior in extraction and use to all fossil fuels and biomass. In general, after air and water, it is the most used natural resource by humanity.

It is much easier and cheaper to extract sand than other resources. Add to this the widespread misconception that sand supplies are inexhaustible, and it becomes clear why Jianguo Liu and his colleagues are warning of an impending shortage.

Three years ago, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) concluded that the extraction of sand and gravel “far exceeds the rate of its natural renewal.”

“There is a huge gap between the scale of the problem and public awareness of its complexity,” their report says. “The lack of global monitoring of sand and gravel mining undoubtedly contributes to a lack of knowledge and understanding, which leads to a lack of action.”

Like the extraction of other natural resources, sand mining has many negative consequences for both nature and humans. The most obvious and rapid is the erosion of the banks of rivers and lakes. In addition, intensive sand mining destroys corals and algae, destroys ecosystems and habitats of numerous animal species, including fish, dolphins, crustaceans, and crocodiles. In the Cambodian province of Tatay, according to local tourism official Chea Manit, catches of fish, crab and lobster in the river, from which sand has been taken for several months, have decreased by 85%. After this, the area ceased to be popular with tourists.

Sand mining weakens the protection of coasts from storms. (In Sri Lanka, it has been shown to significantly worsen the effects of the 2004 tsunami.) Sand mining leads to water shortages and crop failures. There are also less obvious consequences. For example, scientists have recently proven that intensive sand mining leads to a sharp increase in populations of... malaria mosquitoes.

“Large-scale sand mining increases the vulnerability of local communities to natural disasters,” said Aurora Torres, a researcher at the German Center for Integrative Biodiversification Research and one of the authors of the September article in Science. “It creates and intensifies sociopolitical conflicts and gradually displaces entire populations.”

The social consequences of sand mining include the so-called sand mafia. In a number of developing countries, such as India and Bangladesh, this type of organized crime is the most powerful. This summer, a constable died at the hands of the Indian sand mafia in the area of ​​the Jamna River (Yamuna; Haryana state). The number of law enforcement officers injured and even killed in the fight against sand mining runs into the dozens. Mafiosi do not spare not only the police, but also their competitors. Hundreds of people have become victims of sand wars in India in recent years.

Cambodian ban

The extraction and use of natural resources has always fueled social and political conflicts. Today, another “actor” has appeared in these conflicts - sand.

In mid-July 2017, Cambodia banned its export. It's no secret that the ban is primarily aimed at Singapore, where, according to the Ministry of Industry, Mining and Energy of Cambodia, the lion's share of Cambodian sand went. The complete ban comes after a temporary suspension of exports in November last year. Even earlier, in May 2009, Phnom Penh imposed an embargo on the export of certain types of sand, primarily river sand.

In announcing the ban, Ministry of Industry, Mining and Energy spokesman Meng Saktera stressed that the government had responded to the concerns of the public and environmentalists and agreed that sand mining on a gigantic scale does cause great harm to the environment.

Conservationists in Cambodia were very outraged by the colossal discrepancies in UN statistics: the volumes of sand imports by Singapore and exports from Cambodia categorically do not coincide.

According to UN statistics, Singapore imported 73.6 million tons of sand from Cambodia between 2007 and 2016. According to Phnom Penh, sand exports to the city-state amounted to... 2.7 million tons.

Most experts attribute the astronomical difference to serious corruption in Cambodia. It is not surprising that many environmentalists are skeptical that a complete embargo can be implemented in practice.

Sand corruption flourishes, of course, not only in Cambodia, but also in other countries in Southeast Asia. In 2010, several dozen Malaysian officials were charged with bribes and receiving sexual favors in exchange for permission to illegally export sand to Singapore. Some of the accused ended up behind bars.

Vanishing Islands

Three years ago, UNEP declared Singapore the largest importer of sand on the planet, with 5.4 tons of sand purchased from other countries per inhabitant (UN Comtrade, 2014). The city-state needs sand not only for construction, like everyone else, but also for a program that has been ongoing for half a century to increase its territory due to land reclamation. Sand plays the main role in this process.

In the summer of 1965, after gaining independence, the area of ​​Singapore, including 63 islands, was 581 km 2. In a little more than half a century, thanks to land reclamation, it has grown by almost 140 km 2 and now amounts to 720 km 2.

By 2030, the area of ​​the city-state should increase by another 100 km 2. Along with the territory, the population is also growing: in 1960 it was 1.63 million people, and in 2016 it was already 5.6 million.

The surface of the main island used to be hilly, but now it is as flat as a billiard table. Sand from the razed hills was used to fill new areas. Having quickly used up their own meager supplies, Singaporeans turned to their neighbors for help. Over the past 20 years, they have imported 517 million tons of sand (UN Comtrade, 2014). An insatiable “sand appetite” is the main reason for Singapore’s not the best relations with neighboring countries, and above all with Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur often threatens to cut off drinking water for Singaporeans, which they, along with many other things, do not have.

Before Cambodia, Indonesia was the main supplier of sand to Singapore. Ten years ago, at the beginning of 2007, Jakarta announced a complete ban on the export of Indonesian sand to Singapore, the share of which in Singapore imports exceeded 90%. The ban was not unexpected, if only because over the years of selling sand to Singapore, Indonesia lost 24 sand islands. In total, Indonesia has 17.5 thousand islands, of which only 6 thousand are inhabited, that is, every third. The estimate, however, is approximate: there are so many islands that even the Indonesians themselves do not know their exact number. Relations between the neighbors over sand have become so strained that some in Jakarta have even called for a military blockade of “insatiable Singapore.”

In Indonesia, they were afraid of losing not only several islands, but also the surrounding ocean with all its riches. The embargo provoked a “sand crisis” in Singapore: construction almost completely stopped, and sand prices increased seven (!) times: from $6.5 per ton to $50. After 2007, Singaporean builders diversified their sand sources to include China, Vietnam, Myanmar, the Philippines and Cambodia. Singapore Builders Association President Kenneth Liu hopes, writes the Straits Times, that diversification will help soften the Cambodian ban.

The increase in the area of ​​Singapore leads to the disappearance of entire islands from its neighbors and to the fact that the boundaries in this region are constantly changing. It is not surprising that most Southeast Asian countries have banned the export of sand to Singapore.

The bans gave birth to a lucrative smuggling trade. Singaporeans are most often in no hurry to remove the sand themselves. In Cambodia, for example, sand smuggling is usually done by the Vietnamese. They sail at night on small barges to the Indonesian and Malaysian islands, suck up hundreds of tons of sand from the seabed with dredge pumps and take it to Singapore.

Representatives of Greenpeace in Indonesia claim that even after the sand embargo, smugglers export about 300 million m 3 every year. Jakarta says they have the situation under control, but the islands in the Riau archipelago continue to melt before our eyes. If measures are not taken, then, environmentalists are sounding the alarm, seven of the 83 islands of the archipelago may disappear.

Who needs it

In Singapore, they probably consider the number seven unlucky. Malaysia was the first to announce a ban on the export of sand to the country - in 1997. Exactly ten years later, Indonesia followed suit, and another decade later, Cambodia. Now it's Vietnam's turn. Eight years ago, Hanoi, at the same time as Phnom Penh, banned the export of river sand from the country. It seems that a complete embargo on the export of sand, following the example of the Cambodian one, is not far off. The decision on the upcoming ban is obvious, because, according to the forecast of the director of the Department of Construction Materials under the Ministry of Construction of Vietnam, Pham Van Bac, construction sand will run out in three years, in 2020! Along with Singapore, Dubai is one of the most insatiable in terms of sand. The city on the coast of the Persian Gulf amazes with many architectural wonders and wonders, all created from the same sand.

The $12 billion project, the Palm Jumeirah artificial island chain, required 186.5 million cubic meters of sand and 10 million cubic meters of gravel.

Dubai did not limit itself to just one “island” project. Immediately after the delivery of Jumeirah, now considered the largest artificial island on the planet, a second project was announced - Palm Jebel Ali, which should be one and a half times larger than the first and become a place for a quarter of a million people to live. The third island project - Peace - is even bigger. It will consist of 300 artificial islands with an area of ​​14 thousand to 42 thousand m 2, separated from each other by hundreds of meters of sea. Using them it will be possible to study the world map: for example, in the World there is also the island of St. Petersburg. The cost of the project is $14 billion, and it requires 450 million tons of sand.

The construction of artificial islands is being carried out by Nakheel Properties. Upon completion, all three projects will increase Dubai's coastline by 520 km. Dubai has practically no sand left; it has to be imported from other countries. For example, sand for the construction of the tallest building on the planet - Burj Khalifa - was purchased in distant Australia.

“Italy is being stolen away for souvenirs!”

Sand is stolen not only by smugglers, but also... by tourists - along with pebbles from seaside resorts. Everyone, of course, does this not on an industrial scale, but, on the other hand, there are so many tourists who want to take home something as a souvenir that they threaten the very existence of the famous sandy beaches. For example, in Italy.

Several years ago the Italian press sounded the alarm. The most authoritative publication on the peninsula, La Repubblica, came out with the loud headline “Italy is being stolen away for souvenirs!” The article was not about the wreckage of the Colosseum and the Forum - they always tried to take a pebble as a souvenir there, but about seemingly unnecessary sand and pebbles. As an example, Repubblica cited the island of Elba, where about 1.5 million tourists vacation annually. If every second person grabs a handful of sand or pebbles they like, then the total will be several tens of thousands of tons. No one has counted the losses of Elbe from vacationers, but the fact that they are great can be seen in the example of Portoferraio, where, according to Homer, the Argonauts led by Jason were shipwrecked. Thanks to the efforts of tourists, the town has practically lost its famous spotted pebbles, which, according to legend, were formed as a result of drops of sweat from the Argonauts falling on them.

The sand and souvenir business is on a grand scale. You can buy sand and pebbles from famous Italian resorts without even vacationing in the Apennines.

The starting price for a handful of sand from the best Italian beaches on virtual auctions, including e-bay, is €1.99.

However, erosion is much more dangerous for tourists on the sandy beaches of Italy. Its negative impact is especially great in river deltas. Suffice it to say that near the famous Arno, on which Florence stands, erosion has eaten up almost one and a half kilometers of the coast over the course of a century.

About half of the sea beaches also suffer from erosion. In the southern province of Puglia, the loss of the word "sandy" threatens two out of every three beaches. Local authorities, of course, are not sitting idly by. They do not buy sand in distant Southeast Asia, but try to intercept it from their neighbors. Of course, it would not be entirely correct to talk about sand wars between Italian cities, but serious passions are running high. Relations between neighbors are so tense that several years ago, when the authorities of Lecce decided to borrow 200 thousand m 3 of sand in Brindisi to replenish sand on their beaches, the Italian Court of Appeal had to intervene in the matter. The judges sided with Brindisi. The municipality of Lecce found a solution: sand was bought in Albania.

Optimists hope to avoid sand wars, although the situation with sand is threatening. It can be assumed that other suppliers, when they understand the seriousness of the problem, will sooner or later ban the export of sand abroad. In general, builders in Singapore, Dubai and other countries need to at least partially replace sand with other materials as quickly as possible. For example, you can try to use sludge for land reclamation, and straw and wood in the construction of buildings. Asphalt, concrete and glass should be reused. The production of artificial sand also looks promising.

Sand is a bulk substance that is mainly used in the construction industry. Most of its production is used to meet the needs of public utilities, landscaping, glass production and construction.

Where is sand mined?

Sand is an irreplaceable natural raw material, but some people don’t even think about where sand is mined. Material can be removed from the following locations:

• In the rivers.
• In the seas.
• On the plains.
• In the mountains.

Raw materials mined in different places have different properties, which are taken into account when choosing the area of ​​use.

Features of individual types

Fine-grained sand is mined from the river bottom, which, thanks to the constant flow of water, is washed from clay and silt impurities. It is well suited for finishing work.

Sand mined from the sea is used to create concrete and building mixtures. This is due to the fact that for such production it plays an important role where exactly the raw materials were obtained from. Sea sand is richer in impurities and, after cleaning and enrichment, is excellent for these purposes.

On the plains and in the mountains, mining is carried out using the quarry method. Material raised to the ground is often contaminated with impurities, for example, clay or lime deposits. Therefore, during extraction, all raw materials are sifted and washed. Sand mined in this area is well suited for use in construction and asphalt concrete production.

Quartz sand

Quartz sand deserves special attention - which is a material obtained by mining natural rounded sand or processing rocks based on silicon.

Quartz has excellent sorption ability and allows you to remove iron and manganese from water. This sand is quite resistant to mechanical, physical, atmospheric and other influences, due to which it is actively used in the production of finishing materials and in landscape design. One of its unusual uses is in food service, as it is used to make coffee.

Extraction methods

If we talk about how sand is extracted, it is worth noting that there are two main methods:

• Underwater.
• Open.

The first method involves mining in quarries that have been previously watered using special equipment:

• Draglines.
• Skeperov.
• Dredger.

To obtain raw materials in this way, special floating installations are used, which are a pontoon that can be fixed in one place using cables and anchors.

The installations are necessarily equipped with dredgers, which are nothing more than powerful centrifugal pumps. Their throats sink to the bottom, where they suck up sand and crush it using a built-in disintegrant. After extraction, the material is pumped through a slurry pipeline to the shore where it is dried. The main advantage of this method is that it allows you to clean the material from all impurities.

With open-pit mining, quarries can be either dry or water-logged. In this case, the depth of the substance can be different, both below the surface and below the groundwater level. At the same time, the quarry, depending on the method by which extraction is planned, can be either watered or dry.

Mining sites located on mountain slopes are usually called slope quarries. They are characterized by the fact that the location of the material is located above the terrain level; therefore, an exclusively dry method of production is used.

Carrying out construction work, regardless of its complexity, requires the availability of high-quality sand. This building material is of natural origin and is mined in special quarries. Due to its enormous popularity, every specialist involved in the construction industry should know how sand is extracted. Having such knowledge, you can assess the relevance of its use for a particular type of construction!

Basic characteristics

In its natural form, it is a sedimentary rock and in most cases consists of the natural mineral quartz. According to composition and origin, it can be divided into several types:

1. Natural, mined through the destruction and subsequent grinding of natural rocks to the state of a homogeneous substance of small grains;
2. Arising as a result of natural phenomena: raw materials belonging to this type can be divided into alluvial, deluvial, sea, lake and ash;
3. Heavy artificial, obtained as a result of the deliberate loosening and crushing of various hard mineral rocks. In this case, a substance with different grain sizes and fineness is obtained.

When used for construction purposes, it is important to know where sand is mined, have information about its processing methods, and also know about other characteristics.

Basic mining and processing methods

To understand how it is obtained, you should study the main sources of its production.

1. River. The most common building material that is mined near riverbeds or from the bottom of rivers and reservoirs. It is characterized by extreme purity and the absence of impurities, clay deposits and small stones;
2. Career. There are two varieties: washed and seeded. In the first case, it is extracted by digging quarries and subsequent crushing of the resulting raw materials by washing and cleaning them from various impurities and deposits. The second option involves drying and further sifting, which allows you to rid the raw materials of harmful impurities.
3. Naturally educated. Current legislation determines that such raw materials can be classified as bulk materials of inorganic origin. According to GOST, it has special requirements for grain size and fineness.

Material extracted from special deposits differs from raw materials from places where river sand is mined. Considering that various repair and construction work may require one type or another, special attention should be paid to the choice.

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Experts in the construction field assure that quarry sand is an almost universal material that is used in the construction of buildings and structures, roads and railways, landscape design, etc. As the name implies, this building material is mined in quarries that are scattered throughout territory of Russia, such huge deposits of sand are located in our country. At the same time, sand extracted from various quarries has its own specific qualities, due to which the feasibility of its use for specific purposes is determined. Quarry sand is extracted by open pit mining, sifting or washing, and in some cases, it also undergoes subsequent processing. When , the material is immediately shipped to consumers by road, rail or river (sea) transport. And since it does not undergo processing, the composition of such sand includes a large number of various impurities, which narrow its scope of application. This is for backfilling trenches, ditches and pits, as well as as backfill during the construction of foundations of buildings and structures. As for seeded and washed quarry sand, there are significantly fewer impurities in it, so the scope of its use is much wider than that of sand that is not processed after mining.

Seeded quarry sand is mined by an open pit method, after which it is sifted using special equipment to rid the material of large inclusions and various impurities. The sifting process itself is quite simple, because it is carried out using, so to speak, standard equipment, which is quite common in industry. Standard screening machines consist of a receiving hopper and a so-called screen with a removable mesh, by replacing which you can adjust the size of the grains of sand in a specific batch of sand. Seeded quarry sand is used in foundation and plastering work, creating mortars for masonry, road work and landscaping, as well as for backfilling holes, ditches, trenches, etc. However, experts note that in the latter case, using seeded sand is unprofitable, because it is somewhat more expensive than quarry, which has not undergone further processing. Delivery of such sand to consumers is possible immediately from the extraction site, provided that the quarry has screening equipment, or from sand storage sites at enterprises specializing in sifting quarry sand. In the latter case, as a rule, the cost of sand is slightly higher. This is due to the fact that an extra link appears in the producer-consumer chain in the form of an intermediary.

Washed sand is mined in quarries by leaching, so the presence of foreign inclusions in its composition is negligible. The material is extracted hydromechanically from the watered layers of deposits, which makes it possible to achieve high purity of sand, without the presence of clay and dusty particles, which significantly degrade the quality of the material and narrow its scope. Washed sand is used for the production of bricks and concrete, as well as products made from them. In addition, such clean sand is used to prepare dry construction mixtures and plastering solutions. The cost of quarry washed sand is higher than sand that has been screened after mining. This is due to the more complex process of its extraction and the high purity of the material. But even despite the relatively high cost of such sand, its popularity among consumers is growing every year, which directly affects the volume of washed sand production. Sand washed in quarries has become so popular that you can buy it in St. Petersburg in batches of almost any size. The most common way to deliver such sand to consumers is by road. In second place in popularity is railway transport, which is rented by construction companies that daily need large volumes of washed quarry sand. And the last method of delivery is by water by river or sea transport, which is used where there is no road or rail communication.

Sand is in demand today in many areas of production. Especially a lot of it is spent on the production of building materials and mixtures. Depending on a particular technological process, different types of sand are used. Methods for extracting the latter are determined by their location (mountain, river, sea) and technology.

Dry method

This method is used to extract the vast majority of sand from open pits. The developed deposit is pre-prepared. Bulldozers and scrapers remove overburden - a layer of soil and clay. The removed overburden exposes sand deposits and makes it possible to determine its coefficient (the ratio of its volume to the size of the mineral).

Then they begin to lay transport trenches and working projections. The dimensions of the latter are determined by the excavator’s digging height.

Excavators with one or more buckets are used to extract sand from quarries. The bucket, depending on the task, can scoop up from 0.25 to 15 m3 of sand. If the latter is very powerful, then its development is carried out layer by layer.

Dust particles of clay color quarry sand in a yellow-orange hue and worsen its important properties. Therefore, when using this raw material to produce mortars or products, it is additionally purified. Such purified sand is widely in demand in construction:

• included in plastering and masonry mixtures;
• filler for sand-lime brick and aerated concrete.

Hydromechanized method

Hydromechanized extraction of sand from quarries uses a lot of water, which is pumped from a nearby reservoir by a pumping station. Water comes out through the hydraulic monitor under strong pressure in one powerful jet, eroding the desired section of the embankment. The resulting slurry of sand and water flows naturally (if the necessary slope is created) into hydraulic dumps, or is forcibly pumped out by dredgers.

This method gives better sand purity, as it removes debris and foreign impurities.

Sand is removed from the bottom of reservoirs using special equipment on pontoons, which is stabilized using a system of cables, piles and anchors. Bottom sand is extracted using the following equipment:

• scrapers;
• dredgers;
• dredgers;
• dragline excavators;
• centrifugal pumps.

Using a dredger and using a mechanical ripper, bottom sand is fed through a pontoon slurry pipeline to hydraulic dumps. The result is sand of the best quality, applicable in any construction process.