I’m not sure I’ve mentioned Saudi Arabia’s Neom project before, the plan to build a 170km long, 500m tall linear city arcology in the northwest Saudi desert.
As this Patrick Boyle video shows, things aren’t going swimmingly.
Pitched in a mock “I think it’s a great idea, so please don’t Khashoggi me” tone, Boyle points out a few niggling problems with the entire concept.
“Neom The Line is a 170 km long city being built in the deserts of Saudi Arabia that was supposed to cost $200 billion to build. It’ll accommodate nine million people in a massive structure that is 200 meters wide and 500 meters tall. It’s conveniently located in an allegedly empty area of desert.”
It will have “all of the modern features that you would want, like an artificial moon, robot dinosaurs, flying cars, human gene editing and glow-in-the-dark sand.”
“The only abundant resources that a group of consultants could identify were sunlight and unlimited access to salt water.”
“Bloomberg reports that the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund cash reserves have fallen to $5 billion as of September, the lowest level since 2020, The Live City according to the latest reports, is now only expected to extend 2.4 km and house 300,000 people by the end of the decade. This is a 98.6% reduction from the initial plans. So it’s still going ahead, it’ll just be a little bit smaller than had been hoped for a while.”
“Building an unusually densely populated 170 kilometer long city that’s as tall as some of the tallest buildings in the world in what is described as a harsh dry desert with great temperature extremes strikes me as a great idea. Other people have not been as positive about these plans.”
Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) announced plans for Neom four months after being named Crown Prince successor to current king Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
“The project is being overseen and financed by the Saudi Arabian Sovereign wealth fun, which the Crown Prince also chairs. It was pitched as costing $200 billion, but upon reflection might cost a bit more than that.”
“Off the top of my head I can’t think of any other cities that are 170 kilometers long while only 200 meters wide and 500 meters tall. In fact, I struggle to think of any cities that are taller than they are wide.”
“Historically, skyscrapers have been built in very dense urban locations where the price of land is so high that it makes economic sense to build upwards to minimize the cost of the land per total floor area of a building.”
“I found a paper by Brinkley and Raj which explains that in open systems, perfusion guides form and growth. They explain that ecosystems grow as fractals, with new branches sprouting in order to maximize profusion and resource uptake. They go on to explain that most cities grow as fractals branching out maximizing the urban interface with available fuel and arable land.”
Of course, Neom has no fuel or arable land nearby. In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Oath of Fealty, they argue that an arcology needs to be built near an existing city (in their case Los Angeles) to prosper.
“A long narrow city guarantees that inhabitants are always the maximum distance from wherever they need to go.”
Boyle examines the claim that you can travel from one end of Neom to the other in 20 minutes and has a little fun with math:
To travel 170 km in 20 minutes, you’d have to be traveling at 510kmph, which is a bit faster than and the world’s fastest train. Of course, 510kmph assumes no stops along the way, which might be a bit inconvenient for people who live near the middle of the city. London Underground stations and New York subway stations are usually about a quarter of a mile apart from each other. [I believe Boyle is mistaken here, and London tube stations are closer to an average of a mile apart. -LP] 170km is 105.6 miles, so the line would need 412 train stops along the way subway trains usually stop and open their doors for at least 30 seconds at each station so with 42 stations the train would be stopped for 206 minutes allowing people to get on and off the train at the stations. 206 minutes is of course a bit more than 20 minutes, so people would need to get on and off the trains a bit quicker than that. If the train stopped for just two seconds at each station, the train would only be stopped for 14 minutes leaving us with six minutes to travel 170 km, so we would just have to travel at 1,700km hour which is a bit over 1,000mph. 1,000mph would, of course, be an average speed. There would have to be a lot of extreme acceleration and deceleration going on, meaning that the top speed would have to be well over 1,000mph. You’d have two seconds to get on or off a train that would quickly accelerate up to, let’s say, three times the speed of sound before slamming on its brakes for the next station.
Enjoy the g-lock.
“The Line is going to be a fairly busy city. Nine million people will be living on a footprint of just 34 square kilometers, which is 13 square miles. Manila in the Philippines has the world’s highest population density with 119,600 people per square mile. Neom would have 686,000 people per square mile, which is almost six times the population density of Manila.”
“The Wall Street Journal reviewed 2300 pages of documents put together by Consultants at BCG McKenzie and Oliver Wyman, the consultants were directed by MBS to help turn his idea into a reality. And the documents highlight that the project is so ambitious that it incorporates many technologies that don’t yet exist.”
“The Line is going to be 500 meters tall, which is about the same height as Taipei 101, which was the tallest building in the world when it was built 20 years ago at a cost of just under $2 billion. Taipei 101 is 75 meters wide, so you would need to build 13.3 of these for each kilometer. 2,270 of these buildings would equal just one wall of The Line. For both city walls you would need 4,540 Taipei 101s.”
“And that’s just the external walls. There’s still all the inner buildings, the hyperloop, the floating gardens, the autonomous flying pods and the artificial moon. Let’s not forget power plants, water desalination plants, airport, sewage treatment, human gene editing facilities, and everything else needed for a modern city.”
“The Line will have about half of the population of New York City, and thus should require around 5,000 megawatts of power per day. It might need a lot more than that, as water desalination is very energy intensive, and being based in the desert, people might want to run their air conditioners most of the time.”
“New York City requires hundreds of power plants to run, but gets around one third of its power from four nuclear power plants. Let’s say The Line is a very energy efficient city and can get by on one third of the power consumed by New York City. You would then need to build four or five nuclear power plants to supply that power.”
“Each power plant would cost between $6 and $9 billion, so we’re looking at $30 to $40 billion just for the power plants to supply electricity.”
“The 4,500 140 Taipei 101 buildings needed just as the exterior walls for The Line would cost $9.1 trillion dollars, assuming that construction costs have not gone up in 20 years, which they probably have. MBS was initially going to build all of this for $200 billion, which is less than 2% of the cost I’ve estimated for just the walls.”
“Thunderf00t estimated the overall build cost of a city like this to be $100 trillion.” Thunderf00t also looked at the failure of all of Dubai’s land reclamation projects in the Persian gulf save the very first, none of which are remotely as ambitious as Neom.
I think you get the idea.
Murdering the occasional jihad-friendly journalist aside, MBS actually has carried out some significant reforms (like sidelining the hardline Wahabbist clerics), but his pet Neom project is clearly 95% delusional. Despite which, they’ve already done fairly ridiculous amounts of earthmoving on the project.
They are a few decent ideas among the delusions: It wouldn’t be a bad idea for the Saudis to incubate a tech sector, they get enough sun that getting into manufacturing solar panels to help plan for a post-oil future might be a viable option, and they probably should invest in desalinization plants to develop some agricultural self-sufficiency.
But the idea of building the full Line is a delusional fantasy.
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19 Responses to “Why Saudi Arabia’s Neom Is Doomed”
I’ve been to Saudi Arabia, and they do seem to have a penchant for those living housing that nobody wants.
I lived in Eskan Village for a while. It was a rather large compound, built to house Bedouins. The individual houses were very nice, multiple large bedrooms and living rooms. Nice flat roof with patio on top however, the Bedouins prefered to continue living in the desert in their tents with their generators, TV satellite dishes, camels, Toyotas, and sheep. so Eskan village was given to the Americans to house military.
The history of projects like this in Saudi Arabia suggest that there are a lot of folks in the deal getting a piece of the money, I would suspect this one is no different. So it may in fact be a wildly, successful project, whether any buildings get built or not.
It hurts pointing out how doomed this project is, even though I didn’t know it existed before I read the blog post. I’ve still got a part of me that’s an 8-year-old boy who likes sci-fi cities & gadgets, and I have to keep reminding myself to lower expectations whenever I read about one of these absurd centrally-planned futuristic boondoggles.
I suppose it also hurts for the thousands of people hired to waste years of their lives on projects that have no hope of success, or the people who could actually benefit from projects requiring this sort of manpower & capital but didn’t get it.
I’ve still got a part of me that’s an 8-year-old boy who likes sci-fi cities & gadgets,
Oh my, me too. But, that part of me is already filled.
I’m cheering on the efforts to flood the Qattara Depression, pulling hydro-power from the flow of the sea water through the tunnels into the basin, and ringing the new inland sea with resorts (of more modest height than the Neom.)
I’d say that anyone taking the whole thing at face value is mistaken.
The Saudis are notorious for doing things that don’t make any damn sense whatsoever, except to themselves. And, the rest of us wind up paying the bills…
It’s more than likely that the Saudis were behind the Carter Administration and its nonsensical abandonment of the Shah in Iran. How’d that work out for them? What expenses have they incurred, because they were worried about the Shah making Iran the most powerful state in the Middle East?
Then, there’s the track record they have with all the rest of their megaprojects; King Khalid Military City, for example…? Supposed to be a major military center of training, manufacture, all of that… Half-occupied, to this day, and mostly by their Pakistani mercenaries.
Like a lot of things that these desert-dwelling types have come up with, there’s very little that is actually viable, mostly because they’re hiring it in and not growing it themselves, organically. You can’t graft a modern technological civilization onto a primitive nomadic rootstock and expect it to take. When the oil runs out, odds are excellent that the Arabian Peninsula will once more be noted mostly for its deserts and internecine conflicts between cousins… Basically, the Appalachians with sand.
The actual Gulf Arab states regarded their Saudi cousins as a bunch of primitive yokels, good for the occasionally hiring as mercenaries and caravan guards. Not much else; which is not to say that they couldn’t become something else, but… There’s a huge gap to cover. There’s also a huge gap in functional intelligence to be concerned about; all that cousin-marriage has implications with birth defects and the intelligence of the kids. Average IQ in Saudi Arabia is supposedly (not sure how much I trust the sources…) 76.4 or so. That speaks volumes as to how far their society is going to wind up going, as opposed to someplace like Singapore, with an average of 106.48 for their population.
On the other hand, the reason they go in for these projects may just be down to that selfsame IQ differential, loathe as I am to say it.
I still don’t think we’ve gotten intellectual testing figured out, and I do not like the ideas wrapped up in the traditional IQ test at all, but you still have to acknowledge that it measures something, and that the results of the differences in that “something” are fairly plain to see.
Probably a twofold problem in Saudi-land: On the one hand, the population ain’t all that smart, and on the other one, there’s this minor problem with totalitarian states making really bad decisions because there’s not enough pushback in those systems when someone has a bad idea.
IQ testing was refined by the US military because they needed to sort a lot of people into appropriate roles very quickly. They still use it. It’s called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. Every recruit takes it.
They also found out, during Vietnam, that below 73 IQ, there is no job in the US military a person can do. No matter how much training. Cannot trust them to aim and fire a rifle. Cannot trust them to sweep out a warehouse. Better to not have them at all in the military. Because the military has jobs to do, and babysitting isn’t one.
If the average IQ in SA is 76, hoo boy. I’ve found that people at that level can do quite well in society. But they cannot do complicated tasks, and cannot be trusted to do simple ones without close supervision.
And while SA has sucked much wealth from the West in exchange for oil, a lot of that wealth came back in the pockets of consultants.
Greg the Class Traitor says:
April 22, 2024 at 10:19 AM
… it also guarantees that a lot higher percentage of the population can have windows that look at the outside world.
This is Saudi Arabia. They’d be looking out at sand. Lots and lots of … sand. I’m guessing part of the plan is the windows are all artificial – screens showing trees and grass and water. (Heck, they’ll have an artificial moon, so….)
Not that this project is remotely viable, but anyone who has lived in Japan and a lot of other places knows about these things called “express trains” and “local trains” and ones in between. With say three sets of tracks per side you could easily have one line with three stops (one in the middle, the others at the ends), one with 20 (every 8.5 klicks) and one with 340 (every half klick).
I’m not so sure that there is an inherent intelligence problem. It’s quite possible I don’t know I would have to go back and look at the place again.
But there definitely is a work ethic problem. in the US, you can see all the mayhem that is created by the high IQ children of wealthy the parents who go to expensive universities and adopt idiotic ideologies and think up ways to blow up the “unfair” world. They’ve never really had to work for anything, and they’ve been insulated from the actual affects of their upbringing in their ideas. “Trust fund babies.”
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a giant trust fund. While one family controls it, it knows that if it wants to keep its position in the kingdom it has to keep all the other tribes and families happy. This is ancient desert Arab culture baked into their genes. The chief of the tribe can be more equal than others, but he must take care of the others.
So every Saudi citizen is looked after from cradle to grave. Nobody really has to worry about starving to death. Some are looked after better than others are depending on the tribe, family, and relationship with the Royal family, but everybody gets a piece of the (oil money) pie. Everybody gets money, a place to live, vehicle, education thru university, jobs.
As far as the welfare of the Saudi citizens go, this sounds like a socialist wet dream. And it has exactly the problem you would expect: most of the Saudis don’t want to do any real work, and I feel no threat or motivation that would drive them to real work.
All the hard work is hired from the outside. The Warriors and the engineers come from the West. The ditch diggers come from Third World countries, including other Arab countries.
And a lot of the young Saudis get bored and think of destructive things to do. Some of them videotape themselves racing cars to destruction, like you see on YouTube, but other realize they have a moral crisis, and they turn into something that makes demands, requires hard work and sacrifice, and promises holy rewards: “fundamentalist” Islam.
A prime example: Osama bin Laden was a trust fund baby. He was the son of the royal family’s chief civil engineer. The bin Laden company built structures all over the kingdom for the royal family and tho not royals themselves, they were closely intertwined. Osama was not particularly inspired to join in the family business, and he came under the sway of the hardliner Islamists. He saw the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as an attack on Islam and founded Al-Qaeda to serve as a logistical system for mujahedin fighting against the Soviets.
When Iraq rolled into Kuwait and threatened the Saudi oil fields, Osama was ready to use Al-Qaeda to try to defend the Kingdom. When the royal family instead asked the US to defend the Kingdom, and allowed major “infidel” forces on Saudi territory, Osama saw this as a betrayal of Islam and sought to overthrow the royal family and strike at America. This got him put on the royal family’s shit list and excommunicated from the bin Laden family. He still had disaffected supporters in Saudi Arabia, even in the royal family (which is huge), but at that point he became an enemy of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
There have long been Saudis who recognize they have a problem with this sort of society, with a lot of unproductive, unhappy citizens that are easy pickings for various ideologies, but they have a really hard time figuring out how to undo it, and, of course, not lose their own position in society. I think the current ruler, MBS, recognizes this, and he’s working hard societies into a more modern place, but he has some really big structural problems inherent to the kingdom that he might not be able to fix without blowing up his own position.
Lawrence, your summary of this video is, like always, excellent. However, I’d encourage everybody to watch the video. This guy is a master of deadpan humor.
A friend who was in the first sandbox war said he and his buddies had a pool going. The winner would be the first one to see a Saudi lift something heavier than his wallet. There was no winner.
Maybe they could bring on the folx behind the California High Speed Rail project in as consultants.
Where does the poop go?
I’ve been to Saudi Arabia, and they do seem to have a penchant for those living housing that nobody wants.
I lived in Eskan Village for a while. It was a rather large compound, built to house Bedouins. The individual houses were very nice, multiple large bedrooms and living rooms. Nice flat roof with patio on top however, the Bedouins prefered to continue living in the desert in their tents with their generators, TV satellite dishes, camels, Toyotas, and sheep. so Eskan village was given to the Americans to house military.
The history of projects like this in Saudi Arabia suggest that there are a lot of folks in the deal getting a piece of the money, I would suspect this one is no different. So it may in fact be a wildly, successful project, whether any buildings get built or not.
How many countries have to be emptied to fill this boondoggle? Maybe the Saudis could build a bridge to Central America.
“A long narrow city guarantees that inhabitants are always the maximum distance from wherever they need to go.”
Maybe. But it also guarantees that a lot higher percentage of the population can have windows that look at the outside world.
Which most consider to be a feature.
It hurts pointing out how doomed this project is, even though I didn’t know it existed before I read the blog post. I’ve still got a part of me that’s an 8-year-old boy who likes sci-fi cities & gadgets, and I have to keep reminding myself to lower expectations whenever I read about one of these absurd centrally-planned futuristic boondoggles.
I suppose it also hurts for the thousands of people hired to waste years of their lives on projects that have no hope of success, or the people who could actually benefit from projects requiring this sort of manpower & capital but didn’t get it.
[…] Why Saudi Arabia’s Neom Is Doomed. “The only abundant resources that a group of consultants could identify were sunlight and […]
I’ve still got a part of me that’s an 8-year-old boy who likes sci-fi cities & gadgets,
Oh my, me too. But, that part of me is already filled.
I’m cheering on the efforts to flood the Qattara Depression, pulling hydro-power from the flow of the sea water through the tunnels into the basin, and ringing the new inland sea with resorts (of more modest height than the Neom.)
Oh well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project
I’d say that anyone taking the whole thing at face value is mistaken.
The Saudis are notorious for doing things that don’t make any damn sense whatsoever, except to themselves. And, the rest of us wind up paying the bills…
It’s more than likely that the Saudis were behind the Carter Administration and its nonsensical abandonment of the Shah in Iran. How’d that work out for them? What expenses have they incurred, because they were worried about the Shah making Iran the most powerful state in the Middle East?
Then, there’s the track record they have with all the rest of their megaprojects; King Khalid Military City, for example…? Supposed to be a major military center of training, manufacture, all of that… Half-occupied, to this day, and mostly by their Pakistani mercenaries.
Like a lot of things that these desert-dwelling types have come up with, there’s very little that is actually viable, mostly because they’re hiring it in and not growing it themselves, organically. You can’t graft a modern technological civilization onto a primitive nomadic rootstock and expect it to take. When the oil runs out, odds are excellent that the Arabian Peninsula will once more be noted mostly for its deserts and internecine conflicts between cousins… Basically, the Appalachians with sand.
The actual Gulf Arab states regarded their Saudi cousins as a bunch of primitive yokels, good for the occasionally hiring as mercenaries and caravan guards. Not much else; which is not to say that they couldn’t become something else, but… There’s a huge gap to cover. There’s also a huge gap in functional intelligence to be concerned about; all that cousin-marriage has implications with birth defects and the intelligence of the kids. Average IQ in Saudi Arabia is supposedly (not sure how much I trust the sources…) 76.4 or so. That speaks volumes as to how far their society is going to wind up going, as opposed to someplace like Singapore, with an average of 106.48 for their population.
On the other hand, the reason they go in for these projects may just be down to that selfsame IQ differential, loathe as I am to say it.
I still don’t think we’ve gotten intellectual testing figured out, and I do not like the ideas wrapped up in the traditional IQ test at all, but you still have to acknowledge that it measures something, and that the results of the differences in that “something” are fairly plain to see.
Probably a twofold problem in Saudi-land: On the one hand, the population ain’t all that smart, and on the other one, there’s this minor problem with totalitarian states making really bad decisions because there’s not enough pushback in those systems when someone has a bad idea.
Dont forget the cloud and rain storm water controls.
(See Dubai)
Chem trailz, doods!
Oh Lord, I hope I live long enough to see Saudi taxi-drivers roaring around in quadcopter air-taxis.
IQ testing was refined by the US military because they needed to sort a lot of people into appropriate roles very quickly. They still use it. It’s called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. Every recruit takes it.
They also found out, during Vietnam, that below 73 IQ, there is no job in the US military a person can do. No matter how much training. Cannot trust them to aim and fire a rifle. Cannot trust them to sweep out a warehouse. Better to not have them at all in the military. Because the military has jobs to do, and babysitting isn’t one.
If the average IQ in SA is 76, hoo boy. I’ve found that people at that level can do quite well in society. But they cannot do complicated tasks, and cannot be trusted to do simple ones without close supervision.
And while SA has sucked much wealth from the West in exchange for oil, a lot of that wealth came back in the pockets of consultants.
‘You can’t graft a modern technological civilization onto a primitive nomadic rootstock and expect it to take”. Great line and comment.
Maybe it’s all a cover for some other building project going on?
Greg the Class Traitor says:
April 22, 2024 at 10:19 AM
… it also guarantees that a lot higher percentage of the population can have windows that look at the outside world.
This is Saudi Arabia. They’d be looking out at sand. Lots and lots of … sand. I’m guessing part of the plan is the windows are all artificial – screens showing trees and grass and water. (Heck, they’ll have an artificial moon, so….)
Not that this project is remotely viable, but anyone who has lived in Japan and a lot of other places knows about these things called “express trains” and “local trains” and ones in between. With say three sets of tracks per side you could easily have one line with three stops (one in the middle, the others at the ends), one with 20 (every 8.5 klicks) and one with 340 (every half klick).
I’m not so sure that there is an inherent intelligence problem. It’s quite possible I don’t know I would have to go back and look at the place again.
But there definitely is a work ethic problem. in the US, you can see all the mayhem that is created by the high IQ children of wealthy the parents who go to expensive universities and adopt idiotic ideologies and think up ways to blow up the “unfair” world. They’ve never really had to work for anything, and they’ve been insulated from the actual affects of their upbringing in their ideas. “Trust fund babies.”
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a giant trust fund. While one family controls it, it knows that if it wants to keep its position in the kingdom it has to keep all the other tribes and families happy. This is ancient desert Arab culture baked into their genes. The chief of the tribe can be more equal than others, but he must take care of the others.
So every Saudi citizen is looked after from cradle to grave. Nobody really has to worry about starving to death. Some are looked after better than others are depending on the tribe, family, and relationship with the Royal family, but everybody gets a piece of the (oil money) pie. Everybody gets money, a place to live, vehicle, education thru university, jobs.
As far as the welfare of the Saudi citizens go, this sounds like a socialist wet dream. And it has exactly the problem you would expect: most of the Saudis don’t want to do any real work, and I feel no threat or motivation that would drive them to real work.
All the hard work is hired from the outside. The Warriors and the engineers come from the West. The ditch diggers come from Third World countries, including other Arab countries.
And a lot of the young Saudis get bored and think of destructive things to do. Some of them videotape themselves racing cars to destruction, like you see on YouTube, but other realize they have a moral crisis, and they turn into something that makes demands, requires hard work and sacrifice, and promises holy rewards: “fundamentalist” Islam.
A prime example: Osama bin Laden was a trust fund baby. He was the son of the royal family’s chief civil engineer. The bin Laden company built structures all over the kingdom for the royal family and tho not royals themselves, they were closely intertwined. Osama was not particularly inspired to join in the family business, and he came under the sway of the hardliner Islamists. He saw the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as an attack on Islam and founded Al-Qaeda to serve as a logistical system for mujahedin fighting against the Soviets.
When Iraq rolled into Kuwait and threatened the Saudi oil fields, Osama was ready to use Al-Qaeda to try to defend the Kingdom. When the royal family instead asked the US to defend the Kingdom, and allowed major “infidel” forces on Saudi territory, Osama saw this as a betrayal of Islam and sought to overthrow the royal family and strike at America. This got him put on the royal family’s shit list and excommunicated from the bin Laden family. He still had disaffected supporters in Saudi Arabia, even in the royal family (which is huge), but at that point he became an enemy of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
There have long been Saudis who recognize they have a problem with this sort of society, with a lot of unproductive, unhappy citizens that are easy pickings for various ideologies, but they have a really hard time figuring out how to undo it, and, of course, not lose their own position in society. I think the current ruler, MBS, recognizes this, and he’s working hard societies into a more modern place, but he has some really big structural problems inherent to the kingdom that he might not be able to fix without blowing up his own position.
Lawrence, your summary of this video is, like always, excellent. However, I’d encourage everybody to watch the video. This guy is a master of deadpan humor.
Nice to see someone remembers “Oath of Fealty”
Nice summary, Eric!
A friend who was in the first sandbox war said he and his buddies had a pool going. The winner would be the first one to see a Saudi lift something heavier than his wallet. There was no winner.