Sand is not running out, the space to extract it is

There is enough sand under the North Sea to maintain the Dutch coastline for centuries. Even so, on 19 August 2026 the Dutch government warned that local shortages could emerge from 2038 onwards. Not because the sand is running out, but because the places where you are allowed to remove it are steadily filling up with other functions: offshore wind farms, cables and pipelines, shipping lanes, protected nature areas and military exercise zones.

That distinction matters. A shortage of material can be solved with a new extraction area or a different supplier. A shortage of space can only be solved by taking that space away from something else, which makes it an allocation decision with winners and losers. For stakeholder and environmental managers working on onshore projects, this is more relevant than it first appears: their flood defence upgrade, their motorway, their business park and their housing site all run on the same sand.

What was actually announced

In a national assessment of sand extraction, State Secretary Annet Bertram of Infrastructure and Water Management writes that prioritisation may come into play if extraction space becomes constrained: nourishment ahead of commercial extraction of fill sand. Having enough nourishment sand for coastal defence is, in her words, of existential importance, and there is no alternative material for it.

The bottlenecks are not evenly spread. Space is tightest for coastal maintenance between Katwijk and Egmond, near the Wadden islands of Texel, Vlieland and Terschelling, and around Walcheren and the Kop van Schouwen. These are stretches where the shoreface is steep and the distance to a suitable extraction area is large. Local bottlenecks may occur from 2038.

The numbers behind it: roughly 22 million cubic metres of sand are extracted from the North Sea each year, about half for coastal maintenance and half as fill sand for construction and infrastructure. For the 2028 to 2037 period, Rijkswaterstaat expects to need some 150 million cubic metres of nourishment sand. And because of sea level rise, demand for coastal maintenance sand could double or triple over the coming decades.

Why the space is shrinking

Extraction is only permitted seaward of the continuous NAP -20 metre depth contour, and deep extraction (more than two metres) has to start at least two kilometres beyond that line. This is not an arbitrary rule but protection of the coastal foundation itself: digging too close to the shore undermines the very thing nourishment is meant to sustain.

Within that band, sand extraction competes with everything the Netherlands has added at sea in recent years. The North Sea reallocation the cabinet decided on 20 March 2026 covers 21 GW of wind capacity in new designated areas, on top of existing capacity, working towards the 40 GW set out in the coalition agreement. Add export cables, interconnectors and hydrogen pipelines, plus shipping lanes that have to be defined more tightly precisely because there are more wind farms. The cabinet reserved 1.7 billion euros for that reallocation, including for shipping safety, fisheries and marine nature restoration.

The concrete measure for sand extraction in that decision is modest: the reservation zone for nourishment sand moves from 12 to 14 nautical miles offshore. That shifts the boundary, but the Netherlands Commission for Environmental Assessment has already concluded that 14 nautical miles will not be enough in the long run. Further solutions, such as extracting deeper, using other locations and applying different extraction techniques, have been deferred to the North Sea Programme 2028-2033. The draft is expected in May 2027, with adoption at the end of 2027.

The bill lands onshore

If nourishment takes priority, in practice commercial fill sand extraction becomes the residual claimant. That sand goes into preparing housing sites, into road embankments, into business parks and into the core of flood defence upgrades. The national Flood Protection Programme is itself a major consumer.

At the same time, onshore extraction is under pressure. ABN AMRO points out that high sand and gravel prices are a recurring phenomenon, partly because a large share of existing extraction permits is expiring while hardly any new projects are getting off the ground. Responsibility for that is no longer with central government alone but shared between the market, the provinces and Rijkswaterstaat, and that divided responsibility translates into few new extraction areas.

The upshot is that sand is taking on the characteristics of scarcities the sector already knows well. With nitrogen and grid capacity, projects have learned that a scarce good cannot be secured with money alone: there is an allocation mechanism, there is a queue, and whoever joins late pays in lead time. Sand is not there yet, but the ingredients are in place: rising demand, a shrinking supply of extraction space and an explicit statement that prioritisation is possible.

A stakeholder issue without neighbours

What makes this file unusual is that the trade-off happens somewhere nobody lives. There are no kitchen table conversations, no drop-in evenings in a village hall, no objectors with a view of an extraction area. Yet it is a textbook stakeholder and environmental management issue, simply with a different cast: fisheries, nature organisations, the wind sector, shipowners, ports, dredging contractors and the sand trade.

Two features deserve attention. First, the legitimacy of the allocation is established in a programme and its environmental assessment, not in a project procedure. Anyone who only joins the table when applying for their own project permit will find the spatial choices already fixed. The consultation moments around the North Sea Programme 2028-2033 are therefore not an abstract policy exercise; they set the boundary conditions for projects that will not be built until the 2030s.

Second, nourishment sand and fill sand sit under different legal regimes. Extraction of nourishment sand is exempted from the permit requirement in the management plans of four Natura 2000 sites involved (the Wadden Sea, the North Sea Coastal Zone, the Voordelta and the Vlakte van de Raan); the same does not apply to fill sand in the same way. For the 2028-2037 period, a new environmental impact assessment will be prepared for both streams. That difference in regime is the lever through which prioritisation can effectively be enforced, even without an explicit allocation decision on paper.

What projects can do with this

The practical consequences can be drawn now, without knowing how the North Sea Programme will turn out.

Quantify the sand requirement early. In flood defence upgrades and area developments, the sand balance often only becomes clear during detailed planning. Knowing the order of magnitude during the exploratory phase allows design variants to be compared on raw material demand, not just on cost and disruption.

Look for links with local soil flows. In Wijhe, the municipality of Olst-Wijhe and the Drents Overijsselse Delta water authority are examining whether local clay and sand can make the IJssel dike upgrade and the adjacent housing development cheaper and more efficient together. Such couplings reduce transport costs and emissions, and they also reduce dependence on a market that is tightening.

Treat raw materials as a planning risk, not a procurement detail. Lead time and price development for fill sand belong in the project risk register, with the same standing as a permit procedure or a grid connection.

Take part in consultation about the sea. Ports, water authorities and regions that are large sand consumers have a direct interest in the extraction areas to be fixed in 2027. That interest is not automatically represented by the parties currently seated at the North Sea tables.

In closing

The message of 19 August is not that the Netherlands will run out of sand. The message is that government is starting to think out loud about who gets the sand once the space to extract it is no longer enough for everyone. That is the moment when stakeholder and environmental management adds value: not once the scarcity has arrived, but while the rules for allocating it are still being written.

For coastal defence, the outcome is predictable, and rightly so. For every other project running on the same material, the question is how much longer they can count on sand as a self-evident bulk commodity. The answer will not be settled on a construction site, but in a programme to be adopted at the end of 2027.