Saudi Arabia sits on some of the largest sand deserts on the planet, including the Rub’ al Khali, the Empty Quarter, an ocean of dunes big enough to swallow small countries, yet it also buys natural sand from other countries. Some of it travels all the way from Australia. A country drowning in sand imports the stuff.
The obvious question is why. If you have more sand than almost anyone alive, why pay to ship it in? For concrete, the answer isn’t only about how much sand there is. It’s about the size, grading and shape of the grains, and what thousands of years of wind does to them.
Why desert sand often fails
Wind is a slow, relentless polisher and sorter. In a desert, grains of sand get picked up and dropped over and over across thousands of years. Each collision wears away tiny sharp edges, while wind separates grains by size. Given enough time, many dune sands end up very fine, poorly graded, round and smooth, closer to microscopic ball bearings than to the aggregate ordinary concrete needs.
That smoothness and fineness are the problem. Rounded grains slide past one another more easily, while very fine, poorly graded sand can demand more cement and water. Ren Wei, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, puts it simply: “The challenge is that desert sand is so fine-grained that it’s not suitable as a fastener in concrete.” Use too much untreated dune sand in an ordinary mix and, as Wei notes, “In other words, the concrete will not be hard enough to be used in construction projects.”
That limit applies to untreated desert sand used as the main fine aggregate in ordinary cement concrete, not to every possible use. In a 2025 lab prototype, Wei’s team pressed fine desert sand together with plant-based additives and tiny wood particles under heat to make something they called botanical sandcrete, strong enough for paving stones and walkways. Promising, but a single early experiment, not a proven replacement for the concrete that holds up towers.
What concrete actually needs
Concrete needs sand with suitable particle sizes, grading, cleanliness and surface texture. River deposits can provide coarser, better-graded grains, while quarries can crush rock into angular manufactured sand. Those particles pack and bond more effectively with cement paste, helping the finished material reach the required strength.
So the issue in Saudi Arabia isn’t simply a shortage. It’s having the right material for each job. The kingdom actually sells certain natural sands abroad, overwhelmingly the silica and quartz used in glass and industry, worth around $43 million in 2023. It exports one kind of sand and imports others.
The scale, and the supplier list
This becomes an expensive quirk when a country decides to build on a giant scale. Saudi Arabia’s projects need huge amounts of structural concrete, which means huge amounts of suitable aggregate, much of it supplied domestically from crushed rock and other sources. The kingdom also imports natural sand. In 2023, its total natural-sand imports came to roughly $6.45 million.
Those dollar figures are small against the size of the construction sector, and trade data do not identify the end use of every shipment. I’d read them as a snapshot of one year rather than the full picture of how much sand a country like this moves. But sand crossing an ocean to reach a desert is about as clear a sign as you could ask for that this material is not interchangeable or endless.
Sand as a finite resource
After water, sand and gravel are the most-used natural resources on Earth. The UN Environment Programme estimates about 50 billion tonnes are used every year, extracted faster than geological processes can replace them. Concrete is the world’s most-used human-made material, and the world produces more than four billion tonnes of cement a year to bind it, a sector responsible for roughly seven percent of energy-system CO2 emissions.
And the appetite is growing. A 2026 UNEP report projects that sand demand for buildings alone could rise 45 percent by 2060. Nature took a very long time to make this material, grinding rock down over hundreds of thousands of years, and we are spending it far faster than that.
Pascal Peduzzi, who coordinated UNEP’s sand work, puts it plainly: “Our sand resources are not infinite, and we need to use them wisely.” I’d take the 50-billion-tonne figure as a considered estimate rather than a hard count, but the point holds whatever the exact number.
What I keep coming back to is the grain itself. We picture sand as the very definition of abundance, the thing you count when you want to say “uncountable.” Saudi Arabia’s imports puncture that. The sand under those dunes is real, and vast, yet much of it is poorly suited to the one job we most want it for, because wind has made the grains too fine, smooth and poorly graded for conventional concrete. Scarcity can hide inside the shape of something too small to see.