After its first full year of business in an agriculture-based community, Archer Daniels Midland Co. has found an oil field niche at its Hebron, N.D., grain elevator, according to Prairie Business magazine. Not only does it take wheat, sunflowers and canola, it has added a frac sand transloading facility.
“That is a 24/7 business that is staffed with 12 full-time guys on the frac,” noted General Manager Shawn Schaff. The frac sand operation employs more people than the elevator; there are nine full-time workers there.
“We’re always looking for opportunities,” said Schaff. “We were contacted by an oil service company with the option of using our loop track for additional revenue stream and that’s how that came about.”
While the sand is used for fracking, it is regular sand at the facility and has not been treated with any chemicals. “It comes in by rail and we transload it via conveyor to pneumatic trucks that go to the well sites,” explained Schaff.
There has been a facility in Hensler, N.D., that Schaff also manages, but the Hebron location is the Illinois-based agriculture company’s furthest west location in North Dakota. “We were doing business with producers in that area, and we were looking to expand our footprint in western North Dakota,” Schaff said. “That’s why that site was chosen.”
The elevator has a current storage capacity of more than 2.6 million bushels of grain, ADM spokeswoman Jackie Anderson said. The company looks to expand that capacity in the future.