Industrial and Construction Materials

Industrial minerals are any rock or mineral that has economic value, except for metallic rocks or ores and fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. Their products are everywhere:

Concrete used to construct buildings contains cement (fabricated from industrial minerals) and aggregate, which includes crushed stone as well as sand and gravel.
Cement block, lightweight concrete, and sheetrock for interior use are all made from industrial minerals.
Most road are constructed from concrete or asphalt that contain aggregate. They also use aggregate as a road base.
Unpaved county roads are often covered with aggregates.

Kansas is a principle state for the production of crude gypsum, crude and Grade-A helium, and pumice. Industrial mineral operations in Kansas take place in both surface and underground mines, though the majority of aggregates are produced in surface mining operations.

Did you know?

Kansas records identify 8,800 quarries and mines, of which more than 1,900 are still active across the state.

Construction Materials Inventory

In the past, both federal and state agencies produced county inventories that contained information about the quality, quantity, and location of natural resources that could be useful in the construction of roads and buildings. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) produced material inventories in 20 Kansas counties from 1947 to 1959. State of Kansas agencies, including the Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT), produced 36 county construction material inventories from 1963 to 1982. Some USGS county inventories overlapped with KDOT publications. These inventories proved to be of great utility to state transportation employees, geologists, and private industry. Despite the age of some of the documents, they remain a handy reference tool today.

Inventories contained an overview of the geological history and stratigraphy of an area, photographs of outcrops from road cuts and quarries, and location maps depicting sites where specific materials could be found (sand, aggregate, clay). For some sites, material laboratory analysis information (e.g., aggregate specific gravity, absorption, soundness ) was available. Some USGS publications contained numerous measured sections of rock exposures.

As valuable as these inventories were and continue to be, similar information was not available in the majority of Kansas counties, and the inventories themselves were static, one-time publications. Today, there are areas of Kansas experiencing population growth and economic development that are in need of updated information about the availability, quality, quantity, and location of aggregate and other construction materials that can be readily used by KDOT personnel, county and city public works departments, aggregate resource producers, and the general public.

Web-based technologies and geographical information systems (GIS) software applications provided the opportunity to create a dynamic Construction Material Inventory (CMI) digital platform. In 2006, with funding provided by KDOT, the Kansas Geological Survey developed a CMI website pilot project starting in Pottawatomie County. The county had been experiencing population growth, no state CMI had ever been produced, and the relevant USGS Material Construction Bulletin 1060-C had been printed in 1959.

During the winter and spring of 2006, the project team searched KDOT project records, geological literature, and KGS and U.S. Army Corps of Engineer core holdings. Information was collected on the location and type of 120 commercial quarries, both active and abandoned. The results identified more than 100 individual sites where geological workers had measured and described sections of rock outcrops.

KDOT records contained geological plan and profile information on more than 60 highway miles and 12 bridge construction sites. Field geologists visited many of these sites during the spring, summer, and fall of 2006 to confirm the original geological findings, pinpoint sites more precisely with GPS technology, and photograph key locations. In areas where geological research was more sparse, a limited rotary wire-line drilling program collected nearly 400 feet of core. At the KGS headquarters in Lawrence, field geologists with student assistants worked with website development experts to digitize and place point data online. GIS specialists, cartographic experts, and Data Access and Support Center personnel (DASC) placed a variety of interactive mapping tools and geographical-based overlays alongside the current digital geologic map for Pottawatomie County.

Key CMI website capabilities:

Links to related databases, websites, and digital libraries (USGS, KDOT, KGS, etc.).
The ability to navigate swiftly to precise locations and return to a full-county view.
The ability to click on hundreds of geographically fixed locations to access additional data.
The ability to view a particular site that can be overlain with digital transparencies for geology, topography, aerial photography, roads, rivers, streams, city and county boundaries, etc.
The ability to print a map of the specific area with the GIS features of your choice.

The basic website architecture and GIS framework is now complete. A critical new advantage is that the web-based computer environment provides the opportunity to have CMI information maintained and updated on a continuing basis as new data become available. The long-range goal is now to build upon this pilot study in future projects to create updated interactive computer-based material inventories for all Kansas counties, with the priority of developing CMIs for counties where the need for information is determined to be most critical.

Construction Material Inventory

KGS Directory of Kansas Industrial Mineral Producers

The 1998 Directory of Kansas Industrial Mineral Producers was compiled using records from the Kansas Geological Survey and the Kansas Conservation Commission as of June 1998. Individual entries include the company name, commodity produced, address and phone number, the type of operation, and the legal description for each operation.

Included are known active leases for pits, quarries, and mines that produce limestone, dolomite, sandstone, gypsum, salt, sand and gravel, clay and shale, and volcanic ash. Also included are the locations of active sand and gravel dredges on the Kansas River as of October 1997, and companies that solution mine the underground salt in Reno, Rice, and Sedgwick counties.

Contact Dr. Franek Hasiuk for more information.

Access the KGS Directory of Kansas Industrial Minerals Producers here.

Search by product, county, or Public Land Survey System (township, range, section) coordinates, or select to save all data related to active, abandoned, or active and abandoned producers as a text file.

KGS publications