Posts Tagged ‘Manila’

Why Saudi Arabia’s Neom Is Doomed

Sunday, April 21st, 2024

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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    Posted in Economics, Foreign Policy | 19 Comments »

    jihad/Not Jihad in the Philippines

    Monday, June 5th, 2017

    There’s been some confusion over the phrase “Did you hear what happened in the Philippines?”, as the answer to that question varies depending on which incident you’re talking about. One is jihad-related, the other not.

    The ongoing fighting in Marawi City on Mindanao is definately jihad, being carried out by the Islamic State-affiliated Maute. And just as in the Middle East, the Islamic State is executing chritsians and burning Christian churches

    However, the attack on the Resorts World Manila casino does not appear to be jihad-related:

    The gunman who went on a deadly rampage at a metro Manila gaming complex was a Filipino gambling addict who had been recently barred from the country’s casinos, Philippine police said.

    On Sunday, police identified Jessie Carlos as the assailant in an early Friday gun-and-arson attack at Resorts World Manila that left at least 36 casino guests and employees dead of suffocation from smoke.

    Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said Saturday the tragedy didn’t resemble a terrorist attack by Islamic State, which has claimed the gunman was one of its fighters. Militants allied with Islamic State have been fighting Philippine troops in the country’s south for nearly two weeks, leaving more than 100 people dead. Also Saturday, dramatic security video footage of the attack was released to the public.

    Manila Police Chief Oscar Albayalde, who spoke to the media Sunday alongside Mr. Carlos’s family at a hotel next to the casino, said the attacker had a gambling addiction and was deep in debt.

    Police said the government-owned Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation banned Mr. Carlos from casinos in April at the request of Mr. Carlos’s family. Mr. Carlos, who was in his early 40s, was a father of three who lived with his wife in Manila, police said.

    “This could have probably triggered him,” Mr. Albayalde said, describing Mr. Carlos as a high roller who typically played with a minimum bet of 40,000 Philippine pesos ($808). Mr. Albayalde said Mr. Carlos had been addicted to gambling for several years and had sold property to try to settle his debts.

    So two apparently unrelated incidents.

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    Posted in Crime, Jihad, Military | 1 Comment »