At the beginning of the year, Neom was in the news almost every week. Images, videos and all kinds of information that shock the huge project that seems to be in the hands of Saudi Arabia, a megalomaniac futuristic city in the middle of the desert. But months passed and the project seemed to stall a bit. The last we heard was that there were influencers “selling” life in the first phase of the project, and it wasn’t looking good. Now, one piece of information gives us a broader perspective on the project activity.

News. New details of the construction to take place in The Line have been announced. Information that only highlights the mind-boggling challenge of transforming a massive desert landscape straight out of a science fiction novel into a megacity. The truth is that they consume one-fifth of the world’s available steel.

We recall that The Line is arguably the most important and key “pillar” of Saudi Arabia’s Neom project, which is part of an even larger effort to transform the country’s predominantly oil-based economy into a (luxury) tourism-focused one. The use of fossil fuels will inevitably decrease in the coming years.

A context of uneven work. To understand steel data, we have to go back and do the numbers. Stretching 26,500 square kilometers along the Red Sea coast in the northwest of the country, everything surrounding Neom is an ambitious $1.5 billion development that is moving at such a dizzying pace that it will create a new world (as has now been confirmed). way of life

The length of the line is planned to be 170 kilometers, but the first stage, which will be completed in 2030, will be “only” 2.4 kilometers. Whatever happens, it will be an astonishing achievement as it will reach a height of 500 meters and a width of 200 meters. Its exterior will also be covered in mirrors (not without controversy) and will house an airport. It’s a city of nearly 300,000 people with AI technology and powerful surveillance to monitor how everything from garbage collection to water use is working.

Like? To achieve all this, Saudi Arabian authorities have commissioned a new multi-storey concrete plant costing approximately US$190 million, with the capacity to produce up to 20,000 cubic meters of concrete per day, the majority of which will go to The Line. Leave it to other Neom projects.

In addition, they say more than 100,000 workers are busy removing enormous amounts of soil 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to make room for the massive foundations. Work is also continuing on the foundation piles, with almost 1,000 of the more than 30,000 piles installed so far looking set to grow from strength to strength.

Steel is in Neom. So it’s no surprise that this massive project, 24 times the size of Hong Kong, currently consumes a fifth of the steel produced globally. In this context, Neom’s investment director, Manar Al Moneef, stated a few days ago: “Neom will be the largest customer in the next decade. If we look at our demand in logistics, it accounts for 5% of the logistics market in the world”.

The news also follows a recent promise that the construction process would be more transparent, in order to reassure investors and assume we could raise some additional funds.

Steel in context. And if you’re wondering if it’s too much or too little, here’s some data. According to World Steel, the world produced almost 1.9 billion metric tons of crude steel in 2023. Neom consumed 20%, equivalent to 380 million tons. To put that in perspective, the entire United States consumed only 104 million tons in 2022.

In other words, Neom’s consumption is approximately 3.65 times greater than the consumption of the entire United States, which, in addition to Neom’s massive scale, shows that the project is undoubtedly continuing to move forward.

Image | Neom

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