CFlo wins its first frac sand project in Australia

CFlo has won its first frac sand project in Australia. A Micrograder modular wet processing plant, rated at 80 to 100 tonnes per hour, is in manufacture for a site near Darwin in the Northern Territory, with commissioning scheduled for early next year.

The plant will wash and classify local sand into proppant grades for a large oil and gas operator. It is being delivered through a CFlo Certified Partner in Australia. Neither the partner nor the end user is named here at their request.

The sand has been travelling more than a thousand kilometres

Proppant is a specification product rather than a commodity, and there has been no local source of it graded to that specification. The sand used on this project has been hauled in by road from over a thousand kilometres away.

That distance is the whole argument for the plant. Freight is charged by the tonne over every one of those kilometres, and it is paid on material that is available locally in the ground. Once the plant is running the same specification will be produced on the doorstep, and the saving on haulage alone arrives before any process efficiency is counted. The carbon attached to that haulage goes with it.

What the plant has to hold

Frac sand lives or dies on its grading. The specification is a tight, repeatable particle size distribution with very little silt or fines, and it has to be held hour after hour as the feed varies.

The plant reaches it in stages: scalping and sizing, attrition scrubbing to lift the coatings off the grains, then classification to place the cut points precisely. Around 95% of the process water is recycled and the installation runs with zero liquid discharge, which matters on a remote site with no water to spare. It is built to Australian and New Zealand standards and ships as containerised modules, so commissioning on site is measured in days rather than months. The unit processes behind each of those stages, from the attrition scrubber to the classifier and the water recycling system, are described on the ancillary equipment page.

Proven on the wet side of the specification

The Micrograder's record is in holding a narrow band on silica. In Vietnam it produces float glass sand at 99.3% silicon dioxide, and at a second Vietnamese plant it grades low-iron silica sand for cristobalite manufacture. Same machine and the same discipline of grading to a tested specification, with a different end product at the end of it.

CFlo also produces proppant by the dry route, where the feed allows it. In the Middle East, four Aerograder air classifiers grade locally sourced dune sand to a frac sand specification using no process water at all, as documented in the Abu Dhabi case study. That feed arrives dry and clean and needs only a bottom-end cut, so air will do it. The Australian feed is run-of-pit sand carrying silt and surface coatings that have to be scrubbed off, which makes it a wet duty. The route follows the material rather than a preference.

Ryan Barker, Regional Head of Operations and Delivery at CFlo Europe Limited, is managing delivery of the project.

This is a specification duty a long way from anywhere, which is where modular plant earns its place. The sand has been travelling more than a thousand kilometres to reach this project. Once the plant is running it will be made on the doorstep, to the grade the operator actually needs.

Manufacture is under way now and commissioning is scheduled for the early part of next year. Measured results will be published once the plant is running. Material for projects of this kind can be piloted at CFlo's material testing lab before a plant is specified.