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Industrial Minerals and Uranium Section For information: contact Robert W. Gregory Email: bgregory@uwyo.edu Phone: (307) 766-2286 Ext. 237

Limestone and Dolomite

Revised 03/10/05

Wyoming Lime Producers lime plant north of Frannie, Wyoming. The plant is located in Park County

West Gray Quarry north of Glendo, northern Platte County. Limestone is quarried at this location as needed for highway projects. The site is leased to the Wyoming Highway Department

Rinker Stone aggregate quarry near Guernsey.

Pete Lien, Inc., Hartville limestone quarry. This quarry produces both chemical grade and aggregate limestone.

Holly Sugar sugar beet refining plant in Torrington, Wyoming. Limestone used in this operation comes from Pringle South Dakota. The limestone stockpile is the reddish material in the left center of the photo left of the structures. Photo by Ray Harris, September 2000.

Horse Creek limestone quarries. The roads (diagonal straight lines on the face of the hills) lead to the underground workings in these hogbacks. Some of the spoil piles may be seen near the top of the ridges. The limestone was crushed and sized here and transported by rail to sugar beet plants in Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska. The Pennsylvanian limestone of the Casper Formation is nearly vertical in this locality. Photo By Ray Harris, September 2000.

Wyoming contains large resources of limestone. Much of the resource is chemical grade (95% CaCO3 or greater). Chemical grade limestone is used as the main ingredient in cement manufacturing, as a clarifying agent in the process of refining sugar from sugar beets, and in emissions control in coal fired power plants.

Lime (CaO) is manufactured from limestone by heating (CaCO3 + heat > CaO + CO2). Lime is used in a variety of chemical processes. Lime is manufactured in Wyoming at Frannie by Dakota Lime from limestone quarried six miles northeast of the plant in Montana, at the Warren quarry.

Limestone is also used as crushed stone for aggregate. Most of the limestone quarried in Wyoming is used for this purpose, and primarily in highway construction for road base and as an aggregate in surfacing material.

Dolomite (Mg,Ca)CO3 is used primarily as an aggregate in construction. Rinker Stone, near Guernsey, produces a dolomite marble for aggregate (highway and railroad construction) and also sells a small amount for decorative aggregate. Imerys Marble closed its while dolomitic marble production at Wheatland in 2004.

Chemical grade limestone is quarried near Laramie by Mountain Cement for the manufacture of cement. Beginning in 1999, small amounts of chemical grade limestone have been quarried by Pete Lien, Inc. at Hartville in Platte County for emissions control at the Laramie River coal fired power plant at Wheatland, and smaller amounts have been tested in sugar refining by Western Sugar in western Nebraska.

Limestone is an underdeveloped resource in Wyoming. None of the sugar beet refining plants in Wyoming use Wyoming limestone. The plants in the Bighorn Basin use limestone from the Warren quarry. Holly Sugar in Torrington, 30 miles from the Hartville Quarry, uses limestone from Pringle in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and the Western Sugar plants in Western Nebraska use limestone from Warren Montana, transported to the plants by rail almost 400 miles through Wyoming.

In the past, limestone was quarried in Wyoming for sugar beet refining at Guernsey, at the L-F Quarry southwest of Cheyenne, at the Lost Day Quarry north of Fort Laramie, near Sheridan, in the Bighorn Basin, At the U & I quarry on the west side of the Teton Mountains, and at the extensive underground quarry at Horse Creek, northwest of Cheyenne.

Areas of Wyoming that contain limestone resources are mapped on the Wyoming State Geological Survey's digital map MS-47, "Industrial Minerals and Construction Materials Map of Wyoming". For information about this and other publications on Wyoming's mineral resources see the WSGS pubs page on the WSGS home.