Silica sand: Correlation
Prices it moves with, and why
Industrial sand is high-purity silica sand for glass, foundry moulds, hydraulic fracturing, filtration and silicon. Bulky and cheap, it is priced locally by grade and freight. United States frac sand demand and solar glass growth have been the main swing factors.
No public price Silica sand has no public monthly price series: Priced by grade and freight on private deals; no public monthly index.What its price moves with
Silica sand is the largest ingredient in soda-lime glass, melted with soda ash and limestone. Glass furnace output for windows, containers and solar panels drives demand for both together, though sand is far cheaper per tonne than soda ash.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Shale wells pump large volumes of sand to prop open fractures, making frac sand the biggest industrial sand use in the United States. Local sand mines in shale basins have pushed prices down as drilling patterns changed.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Silicon metal is made by reducing high-purity quartz with carbon in electric furnaces. Quartz lump rather than fine sand is preferred, but silicon demand for aluminium alloys, silicones and solar keeps high-purity silica in demand.
No public price for silicon, so the link is explained in words only.Solar panels need low-iron glass covers and high-purity quartz crucibles for growing silicon ingots. The rapid build-out of solar factories in China has made these grades tight and costly, while ordinary glass sand stays plentiful.
No public price for solar photovoltaics, so the link is explained in words only.Construction sand is a lower-purity product used in concrete and roads. It comes from different deposits and buyers, so its price follows local building activity and quarry permits rather than glass or frac sand markets.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Sodium silicate, or water glass, is made by fusing silica sand with soda ash. It is used in detergents, paper, adhesives and to make precipitated silica for tyres, so these chemical uses add steady demand for clean sand.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.How to read these numbers
Correlation of monthly changes (the number in the coloured pill) compares how much each price moved, month by month, since 2006 or the first month both series exist. It runs from −1 to +1: near +1 the two usually rise and fall in the same months, near 0 there is no link, and a negative number means they tend to move in opposite directions. Above 0.7 is strong, 0.4 to 0.7 moderate, 0.2 to 0.4 weak.
12-month changes compare year-on-year moves, which shows whether two prices share the same cycles even when the month-to-month noise differs.
Price function is a straight-line fit of the two prices on logarithmic scales: price ≈ k × (partner price)β. β is how much this price moves, in per cent, for a 1% move in the partner over the whole period, and R² is the share of the variation the fit explains. Two prices that both drift up with inflation can fit well without any real link, so read it together with the monthly correlation.
Lead or lag checks whether the monthly correlation is clearly higher when one price is shifted by 1 to 6 months.
Correlation is not cause. The reasons on each card explain the economic link; the numbers show how strongly it has shown up in prices. Proxy series are US producer price indexes or related prices and can blur the real link.
Data: World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet), October 2026; US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes, IMF primary commodity prices and US EIA prices via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, retrieved November 2026. Calculations by this site.