Wright County Highway Department “Brews” Up Savings with Innovative Brine Solution

Originally published April 15th, 2024 11:1 a.m.

Updated April 16th, 2024 10:00 a.m.

(KNSI) — The Wright County Highway Department says it has changed the game when it comes to dealing with icy roads.

Many counties, such as Stearns County, have a salt digester that takes the solutions of water, salt, and sometimes additives, and mixes them together to create what gets spread on the roads. Salt digesters are manually operated and also tested manually. They are relatively industry-wide and have been working fine, but Wright County Highway Maintenance Superintendent Nate Helgeson said it’s “an imperfect science at best.”

The county has been mixing its own brine for about 25 years. “When it started, it was basically just pouring salt into water we had in a tank. We had setups at all of our shops, but they were in plastic tanks with plastic PVC pipes.”

Now, Wright County has a centralized salt brine facility that can brew a mixture at an exact percentage of salinity and reduce dependence on premium deicing materials, reducing taxpayer costs. Highway departments never drop pure salt on roads because of the damage it can do, and experts call it a balancing act between safe roads and protecting the environment.

While no product can melt ice and compact snow, Helgeson said the Highway Department will use every tool at its disposal to quickly get roads back into driving shape while limiting the adverse effects of laying products onto roads during and following storms. That may include using straight salt brine, or salt brine/calcium chloride blend when temperatures warrant the increased product.

“The science behind [the new solution] is that when our trucks go out, they’re as environmentally friendly as possible, which is something that is important to us, while still having good, safe public roads. You want the salt going on the roads to be almost an oatmeal mash as the brine gets the salt wet at the spinner and starts the melting process the second it hits the road surface,” according to Helgeson.

Ideally, the goal is to reach 23.3% salinity. If the salinity goes above that mark, the temperature at which it freezes gets higher. Helgeson explains the solution at the 23.3% mark freezes at 6 degrees below zero. Conversely, with 10% salinity, the freezing temperature will be about 20 degrees, which makes hitting the salinity rate correctly important to be effective at colder temperatures.

In the winter of 2022-23, the Wright County Highway Department used more than 121,000 gallons of premium de-icer at $1.50 a gallon – a cost of $180,000. With the addition of almost 90,000 gallons of homemade brine solution this winter, they just 7,436 gallons of de-icer, a cost of a little more than $37,000.

By utilizing the brine solution at 15 to 20 cents a gallon in a typical winter, Wright County says it could save $75,000 to $100,000 by not relying on the far more expensive premium de-icer.

Helgeson tells KNSI News there was an upfront cost and initial investment for the brine facility in Buffalo of about $850,000. That covers the brine equipment, the brine building, the salt shed, and the professional services during construction. The other equipment and storage tanks inside the building cost around $222,000.

The county has been researching and evaluating its strategy for getting something like this up and running for years, according to Helgeson. Even with typical winter conditions, he says the payback should be less than six years.

“No product that takes away ice from roads is going to be 100% eco-friendly,” Helgeson said. “But the combination of the brine we make and wetting the salt that gets laid down helps keep as much of it as possible in the middle of the road. The fact we’re able to try to be as environmentally responsible as we can while saving money for the taxpayers of Wright County in the process is something we take a lot of pride in.”

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