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Saturday, December 12, 2009

Saudi Arabia Running out of Sand

From Treehugger:

saudi arabia peak sand crisis photo
al shaybah oil field, via heatingoil.com

Sounds crazy, that's what the place is made of. Who would think that Saudi Arabia could be running out of sand? Yet the Kingdom has halted exports of the stuff, a major component of concrete, and it is causing problems in Bahrain and other countries that depend on imports of high quality Saudi sand.

Evidently the stuff is in the wrong place; Stuart Burns in MetalMiner reports that "Saudi Arabia has more sand than oil but unlike it's oil, the sand and gravel are predominantly in rather inaccessible areas and the cost of transport for such a comparatively low value product is uneconomically high." So the Saudis are keeping what they've got to themselves.

Who knows, might they do the same for oil when the time comes?

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