Mining Company Sees 'Paws-Abilities' In Growing Cat Litter Business

BILLINGS, Mont. – Wyo-Ben Inc. CEO David Brown cares for nine cats at his digs just south of the exclusive pine-tree lined suburb of Emerald Hills near Billings.  

No problem for Brown when it comes to cat litter, a clumping mixture of different clay types used to fill the toilet box for his rescued cats. 

Brown just backs up his truck to the loading dock at his company’s new South 32nd Street packing plant for cat litter and directs a warehouse worker to use a forklift to load half a pallet into the bed of his monster-sized F-350 Ford truck.

That’s good for handling the needs of the furry-footed creatures for about a month to six weeks.

“I do own too many cats,” Brown chuckled. “I always must pause and count how many. There’s got to be nine at this point.”

Wyo-Ben isn’t just about cat litter – but rather the mineral that it comes from, called bentonite.  

All of the bentonite that Wyo-Ben mines is scraped up and hauled out of up to 80 active surface pit sites in north-central Wyoming, where it also has a handful of processing plants to package the bentonite for many uses. 

Besides cat litter, bentonite mud is used to pack around bore bits to drill for oil and natural gas in the Powder River Basin, as well as uranium in the Red Desert. It’s also used in to process iron ore in steelmaking furnaces.

But it’s in cat litter, Brown told Cowboy State Daily that Wyo-Ben is shaking things up in the business. This is where his company is seeing double-digit growth. 

Shaking Up the Industry

Since the pandemic roiled the world in early 2020, Brown’s company has added more plants and bentonite mining pits in Wyoming through two acquisitions, built and opened a new plant in Billings, bought a Toronto plant to package and distribute cat litter, and begun steps to eliminate “co-packers” who serve as middlemen that process Wyo-Ben’s bentonite for private labels. 

The idea is to create a vertically integrated company from mining bentonite to delivering a cat litter product to the shelves of big retailer shelves.

Over the last few years, Brown has pulled the trigger on the purchase of M-I Swaco from Houston-based parent Schlumberger last fall and made a major investment in Norclay Manufacturing Inc. of Canada earlier this year.

The investment led to Wyo-Ben opening in May its Wyo-Ben Pet Canada hub in Toronto for packaging and distribution.

Plans are on the drawing board to expand the 35,000-square foot Billings plant that opened in 2020 with another 15,000-square-foot expansion, and the addition of a rail spur to bring the bentonite directly to the plant instead of shipping the mineral by truck from Wyoming mines. 

The private label business is big for Wyo-Ben.

The roster of businesses that buy cat litter from Wyo-Ben is a Who’s Who list.  

Target’s Up & Up brand.  Petsmart.  Petco. Pet Depot. They all have their own labels with Wyo-Ben’s cat litter made from Wyoming bentonite.

And even Dr. Elsey’s, a well-known, veterinarian-owned cat product brand recommended by the New York Times that has a production facility in Cheyenne’s Swan Ranch, uses Wyo-Ben’s bentonite to brew its own recipe of perfumed cat litter.

The cat litter business generates about 30% of Wyo-Ben's $100 million annual revenue – though estimates could be much higher. Brown estimates that the oil and natural gas mud for the oil patch makes up 20%, iron ore pellets 20% and a hodgepodge of other uses make up the rest.

Although Wyo-Ben is headquartered in Billings, its bread-and-butter is all in Wyoming.

Its main thing is pulling bentonite out of surface mines in north-central Wyoming and turning it into a product for everything that needs a lubricant or needs an absorbent. 

It also has a handful of packing plants to not only process the bentonite for its cat litter business, but also prepare the mineral for sale to oil field service companies that need the “mud” derived from bentonite to drill for oil and natural gas. The plants also produce products that help create iron ore pellets that are used in the steelmaking process. They also create a product that binds proteins and impact aromas and color in wine. 

Grandpa Started Everything

Mud for the oil patch is where Wyo-Ben got its start.

Brown’s grandfather, Rockwood Brown, started the business more than 75 years ago, but it really got off and running a few decades before then when the elder Brown bought mining claims under the General Mining Act of 1872 as a future business investment possibility.

“No one knows why he started it,” said David Brown of his grandfather. “There’s no real good reason to be in Billings all these years.”

The Brown family does have its fingers in ranching, cattle, sugar beets and other farming activities.

Today, the mining claims to the bentonite lay on upwards of 100,000 acres of land in Wyoming, with an estimated 81% falling on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) stakes and the rest on private and the state of Wyoming ground.

The senior Brown was a lawyer who graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, climbed onto a train and headed for no apparent reason to Billings to set up a law firm with a colleague.   

The Brown Law Firm P.C. remains today as a successor to the 1911 one launched by Wyo-Ben CEO Brown’s grandfather.

Biggest Private Player

Wyo-Ben flies under the radar in the bentonite world.  It doesn’t seek out publicity as a privately held company

But it produces just over 1 million tons annually, giving the company the ranking of third largest among the tiny group of bentonite players with flags in the Cowboy State, according to figures and estimates provided by Brown and the Wyoming Mining Association, a trade group for Wyoming’s extraction business.

The other two are publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

The No. 1 player in Wyoming’s bentonite industry is Minerals Technologies Inc., a New York City-based company with under $3 billion in market capitalization and which pulls an estimated 1.6 million tons of the mineral out of Wyoming’s ground

The second biggest player is Bentonite Performance Inc., a unit of Houston-based Halliburton Co., an oil services business with a $31 billion valuation, and which pulls out 1.2 million tons. 

Nipping at the heels of Wyo-Ben is Casper-based Black Hills Bentonite LLC with 700,000 pounds.

All four of the companies have visible plant and mining operations through bentonite valley in the Big Horn Basin along U.S. 14 near Lovell and other tiny towns in the area. A fifth player, Spanish-based Tolsa USA Inc., barely registers on the list with 20,000 pounds or less of production in the Rock Springs area. 

A playbill is needed for some of the changes in ownership.

Last fall, Wyo-Gen renamed the M-I-Swaco plant near Greybull as the Magnet Cove plant.  The name is for the rail sighting there, which is how Wyo-Ben names all its plants — like Lucerne, Sage Creek and Stucco 

In addition to Greybull, Wyo-Ben operates plants in Lovell and Thermopolis. In all, it employs about 170 people across the three locations. 

There are two kinds of bentonite – calcium and sodium.  It’s the latter bentonite that Wyoming has a lot of.

Calcium bentonite consists of smaller particles, allowing it to possess superior absorption attributes due to the increased surface area. On the other hand, sodium bentonite's larger particle size leads to a higher absorption capacity, which explains its significant swelling ability

Roughly 70% of all sodium bentonite in the world comes out of Wyoming. “Wyoming’s bentonite is of the highest quality,” Brown said.

The bentonite comes out of three mining districts: Bighorn, Kayce and Black Hills. But it’s the Bighorn that produces the majority. 

Getting There

Getting to bentonite country in the center of the bentonite universe of the Bighorn district from Billings isn’t easy.

It takes about two hours to drive south from Billings over into Wyoming along U.S. routes 310 and 14, through some conservative-valued towns that have roots with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as LDS. The drive ends at Greybull, Wyoming, where Brown’s grandfather established Wyo-Ben’s first and biggest bentonite mining operation nearly 75 years ago.

Besides an occasional sighting of a small LDS temple, there are miles of cornfields that have stalks eight-feet tall this time of year growing alongside the country roads, with an occasional sign popping up along the way advertising for an upcoming demolition derby in nearby Powell, Wyo. 

Between Bridger, Mont., and Lovell, Wyo., which sits on the cusp of the bentonite lode in the hundred-mile wide Bighorn basin, a string of tiny towns stretch for about 100 miles and include a diner, bar and police officers who wave to drivers traveling the speed limit of 20 miles per hour over their streets. 

It’s along this route where Wyo-Ben established its first and largest mining operation along the Bighorn River in Greybull. The river makes its way from the Bighorn Lake near Lovell in the north where occasional moose are spotted to Greybull in the south, all in the shadow of the Bighorn Mountains in north-central Wyoming.

Tough Finding Work

In a tour of Wyo-Ben’s mining areas in the Bighorn basin, Jamey Tippets, vice president in charge of operations, pointed out reclamation projects all along tens of miles of rough roads that run alongside Bentonite Performance, Mineral Technologies and Wyo-Ben operations, all adjacent to each other.

“I’m fifth generation here. My dad worked at MTI (Mineral Technologies), as head of maintenance,” said Tippets, who returned to his roots in the Bighorn after a military and aerospace career.   

It's been difficult finding labor to work in these mines and plants, Brown said. 

“All options are on the table. It’s that bad,” Brown said. “We could resort to busing people in. The leaders in the communities in the Bighorn basin need to come together to help with affordable housing. This would help.”

The company, which currently employs about 350 workers but could take another 50-plus, has been somewhat stifled in its growth plans because of worker shortages. Brown blames some of the issues on attracting workers to the area on housing limitations.

“We’re desperate,” he said.  “There are not enough workers.”

Wyo-Gen and others in the Big Horn Basin have worked with community leaders in the Sheridan and Gillette communities to improve workforce recruitment but so far haven’t found a winning formula.  

The company wants to go to a 24-7 work schedule at all plants but is coming up short with filling jobs. Instead, they’re settling for five-day shifts.

The company held an open house on June 21 to invite community members, workers and their families for hamburgers and brats to interact with company executives and plant operators.

“This is the first time the plant ever did this,” said Brown of one of the Greybull plants that it bought from M-I Swaco last year. 

The human resources department has grown from two employees a year ago to five today, with plans to add a sixth.  

“The last thing I want to do is set up a man camp,"  Brown said. "We would be bringing in the unknown,” he said. 

 A "man camp" is a reference to temporary workforce housing to accommodate a large influx of workers in the resource extraction industries, such as like with bentonite mining and processing.

More challenges

There also are conservation challenges facing Wyo-Ben coming from BLM leasing policies to limit mining, legal attempts at taking over their mining claims on BLM lands, sage grouse protections on ranges and worker safety issues related to crystalline silica exposure to toxic quartz in clays that Wyo-Ben mines.

“This (Biden) administration has a full-court press on us,” Sylvester said.

Meanwhile, Sylvester and Brown worry that conservation groups may be gearing up to “grab a chunk of land” owned by BLM to keep Wyo-Ben from crossing the land to mine bentonite.

“It’s a huge worry, because who knows what group crops up out there,” Brown said. “They could lease around us and prevent us from mining.”

That would hurt consumers that depend on products created with Wyo-Ben’s bentonite to care for their pets, or help with drilling in the oil and natural gas patch in Wyoming.

“You can’t live without us,” said Joe Sylvester, the company’s natural resource manager and government affairs executive. “We are essential.”