Beach Nourishment is Big Business

Sand has nowhere to go but up, and we’re all short the market.

"Sand is like gold. There are a lot of projects that rely on it, and it is a limited resource."

-Michelle Hamor, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers'

It's a pretty common sight on beaches in the U.S.

Dump trucks dump piles of sand on the beach while bulldozers work like massive army ants to push it around. Beachgoers are so used to their presence that they move their blankets as the massive trucks and tractors' diesel engines drown out any sound from the waves and belch exhaust into that crisp ocean breeze.

When municipal projects like these grind away in the background, we accept them as part of the maintenance of our towns and cities, like filling potholes. And to some extent, they should be. The millions spent on beach nourishment protect homes and businesses - supporting billions in local economies.

But we're getting to the point where expanding the beaches isn't cutting it anymore. It's taking more sand and only lasts for a short time. The millions are adding up, further stressing federal and municipal budgets, and sand isn't the unlimited resource you think it is.

News of storm events brings a more acute version of beach erosion to the forefront. From recent storms in California and New Jersey to the constant threat of storms in Florida, images of disappearing beaches constantly remind us of the vulnerability of our housing and infrastructure.

+Editorial: To save its coastal rail line, California will need to move it away from the ocean - LA Times

We call it beach erosion, but of course, waves, wind, and sand are just doing what they do, conspiring to move from one place to another, building and receding over long timelines that we have no patience for.

This movement doesn't respect our ideas of permanence and ownership over the natural domain (kind of like those fish).

So the beach projects endlessly toil in the background, repeating one season after the next and leaving the locals to point out where the beach used to go just a few years ago.

And ten years before that? "Well, there used to be three rows of houses in front of mine."

Our constant war with the shifting waterfront presents a balance of old-school tactics like beach "nourishment" (i.e., dumping and pumping sand), hardening projects like seawalls, and technology innovations like wave breakers and artificial reefs.

But what caught my attention was the massive business around one of the most valuable and unrecognized commodities in our industrialized world - sand.

Sand is literally the foundation on which our modern economy is built. From the aggregate under our roads and homes to the specialized silicon of microchips, our reliance on a steady supply of sand rivals that of our global energy systems.  

"Sand is the planet's most mined material, with some 50 billion tons extracted from lakes, riverbeds, coastlines and deltas each year."

+The messy business of sand mining explained - Reuters

Like many of the commodities we rely on, sand in the form we use is a limited resource. Unlike most modern commodities, sand is mostly untracked and unregulated. There is no Energy Information Agency (EIA) for sand.

This article pointed out that a recent global study lacked available supply and demand data, so a proxy had to be compiled.

"A landmark report from the UN Environment Program (UNEP) in 2019 had to rely on data for cement — which sand and gravel are mixed with to make concrete — to land on a ballpark figure of 50 billion tons."

+The world is running out of sand - DW

Not all sands are created equal.  

I say "the sand we use" because, when mentioning sand, a reasonable first reaction is to have a distinct image of the great dunes of the Sahara pop into your head.  

However, that sand is basically useless from an industrial standpoint. So worthless, in fact, that the city of Dubai mostly rests upon sand imported from Australia. 

The problem with desert sand is that windblown sands tumble into little round balls. These smooth edges don't cling together, which makes it less than ideal for construction purposes. Like your footprint disappearing after a step, this sand is too shifty to use as a base or in cement.  

That good construction sand has rough edges, like small, crushed stones, that can fit together. And how does sand get that way? You guessed it.  

Water.

The best sand for aggregate and concrete production comes from lakes, riverbeds, and beaches. And this puts demand for beach reclamation sand in direct competition with these other uses, like global construction projects.

Sandflation and IUU Sand

As quality sand from easy-to-reach sources gets used up, it has become more expensive.

 "For sand, you're now spending $30 to $50 a cubic yard," said Karyn Erickson, president of Erickson Consulting Engineers, a Sarasota-based firm that has been working on beach restorations in Florida for three decades. "In the mid-90s, we thought it was expensive if we were paying $12 per cubic yard. $10 to $12 was the standard rate."

+The pricey race to restore Florida beaches - Phys.org

As we've come to expect from the global fishing industry, the lack of data around sand and its increasing price makes it ripe for abuse. While IUU (illegal, unreported, unregulated) fishing is finally gaining some attention, what about IUU sand?

"We don't understand the impacts enough of where we're taking it from. Sometimes we don't even know where it's coming from, how much is coming out of rivers. We don't know." (DW)

And as it runs out, countries will look to source it from their neighbors. And by source, I sometimes mean steal.

"Last year (2020), Taiwan expelled nearly 4,000 Chinese sand-dredgers and sand-transporting vessels from waters under its control, most of them in the area close to the median line, according to the coast guard. That's a 560% surge from the 600 Chinese vessels repelled in all of 2019." (Reuters)

So it seems the squid-fishing fleet isn't China's only floating menace out there. 

Increased geopolitical tension over limited ocean resources is a common theme in the ocean economy, and sand will just get added to the list of potential sources of conflict.

However, with scarcity and rising prices come greater incentives for tracking and measuring supplies and investing in replacement technologies.  

Beach Nourishment is Big Business

Beach reclamation and nourishment are big business. Search local news in any town on the coast, and you'll find some projects going into local beaches with a budget in the millions of dollars.  

Here's a typical example from Surfer Magazine about a beach rehabilitation effort in Montauk.

"…the $11 million project is part of the $1.5 billion restoration project spanning 83 miles from Montauk to Fire Island, a stretch of New York's coastline riddled with surf breaks. …the project's initial stages are 100% federally funded, but the maintenance needed every four years "will be a local responsibility." 

+New York's Surfing Mecca Gets $11 Million Beach Reno During Erosion Crisis - Surfer

Those are some pretty big numbers for 83 miles of coastline. And there's a lot to unpack in this one example.   

The first phase is "federally funded." That's millions, or even billions, in contracts that go out for bidding. The second is the "ongoing maintenance." No one's pretending that the sand is going to stay put.  

Looking at SAM.gov, the federal website where you can search for contracts and RFPs, I quickly found a beach nourishment project for the coast from Fire Island to Jones Beach. 

The project is for dredging about a million cubic yards of sand from Fire Island Inlet and dumping it on Gilgo Beach. This project's estimated cost is between $15 and $50 million.  

It seems like there is plenty of room for some contractor from Long Island to make a bit of cake. I'm sure the bidding process will be on the up and up.

(Where is that George Santos guy anyway?)

Other beach enhancement projects listed on SAM.gov include five in New Jersey for a total estimated value between $100 and 350 million. Hundred-million-dollar contracts for moving sand around Atlantic City?

What could go wrong.

And the recent images out of Wildwood show these projects are probably understating the volume of sand required.

Sand Tech: Making the Sand Last Longer

While the price of the sand is probably going nowhere but up, people are actually trying to make that smooth desert sand useful.

Another thing that can help is to make it last longer. And that's where this headline about the Sand Motor caught my attention.

+Countries Are Building Giant' Sand Motors' to Protect Their Coasts From Erosion - Wired

The Sand Motor was developed by a Danish industrial consortium of researchers and academics and built by global dredging specialist Boskalis.

Built in 2011, the Sand Motor was expensive and took a ton of sand to build. But it was found to last much longer than the older methods of beach nourishment.  

Very cool video about the results after 10 years of monitoring the project here:

Involvement in the research has paid off for Boskalis as they have now become the constructor of choice for sand motors worldwide, including multiple projects in Africa.

One sand motor was built in Benin as part of a $60 million contract funded in part by the World Bank.  

We’re All Short Sand

The market for sand has nowhere to go but up, and we’re all short the market.

There are no sand futures, and if you're running to look up Boskalis stock like I did, the company was taken private in 2022.

Increased competition among end users puts our tax dollars in jeopardy as the federal and municipal tax pool allocations are forced to compete with the market rate. 

But rebuilding the beaches isn't the only way to keep back the waves.  

Investment in everything from artificial reefs to improved sea walls is ramping up as the potential problem and potential market becomes more widely understood.

"I was just amazed at how expensive sea walls were and how big the market was, and the fact that Miami is by far the number one city when it comes to sea wall production globally," 

-Anya Freeman, Kind Design, Opportunity Miami. 

The firm estimates that Florida alone will need 10,000 miles of sea walls by 2040.

Like other elements of the ocean economy and our efforts to adapt to a volatile future, the numbers involved are enormous.

The headlines about sand will soon creep from local news sites to the financial press as both the challenges and opportunities become more widely recognized.