Bing search "New Babylon".
Posted on 10/25/2017 7:51:12 AM PDT by Simon Green
Saudi Arabia is the world's largest oil exporter, but falling oil prices have made it more difficult for the country to pay its oil workers.
Now the Saudi Arabian government has come up with a project that could give its economy a boost: a $500 billion mega-city that will connect to Jordan and Egypt and be powered completely by renewable energy.
On Tuesday, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced the project, called NEOM, at the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh. It will be financed by the Saudi government and private investors, according to Reuters.
The business and industrial-focused city will span 10,230 square miles. To put that size in perspective, 10,230 square miles is more than 33 times the land area of New York City.
NEOM's larger goal is to lessen Saudi Arabia's reliance on oil exports, which could expand the country's economy beyond oil, bin Salmon said at the conference. The city will focus on a variety of industries, including energy and water, biotechnology, food, advanced manufacturing, and entertainment. Saudi Arabia hasn't released a masterplan yet for what it will look like.
The country appointed Klaus Kleinfeld, a former chief executive of Siemens AG and Alcoa Inc, to run the NEOM project. Officials hope that a funding program, which includes selling 5% of oil giant Saudi Aramco, will raise $300 billion for NEOM's construction.
ReutersThe project could make NEOM one of the largest cities to run without fossil fuels. In the US, one of the largest cities to run on 100% renewable energy is Burlington, Vermont, which doesn't come close to the planned size of NEOM. Cities in Iceland and Norway also claim to be close to achieving entirely renewable electrical grids with help from natural resources like hydropower and geothermal heat.
Saudi Arabia expects to complete NEOM's first section by 2025.
"This place is not for conventional people or conventional companies, this will be a place for the dreamers for the world," bin Salmon said on a panel at the conference. "The strong political will and the desire of a nation. All the success factors are there to create something big in Saudi Arabia."
Good. They can get the Chinese fake GDP growth and reabsorb all the refugees now in Europe back into Islamic areas.
Why is our military and government supporting such an obviously wealthy country? I am pro Israel, but our support has cost how many rptaxpayer dollars?
33 times the size of NY City is about 10,000 square miles - the size of Massachusetts.
Bing search "New Babylon".
this will be a place for the dreamers for the world,
Translation; it’s a place for suckers to pour their money, dreaming that they will get a return from the Saudis.
Indeed, these at the same folks that propose to tow a huge ice berg from Antarctica to KSA to help alleviate the water shortage- it would take a billion dollars and almost a year to move said “huge” berg from place to place. I think the S Pacific warm waters would guarantee the latter stages of the trip would be easier than the beginning stages....
All BS. The dreamers are these folks. Pipe dreams.
Before anyone gets to excited over in Saudi, they should see how much they like the way Burlington looks these days.
The USA will be shipping the Saudi’s water to make this happen.
The Saudi’s own alfalfa farms in western Arizona and along the Colorado River. The hay goes into a container and is shipped to dairies in Saudi Arabia.
I suggest the name Ozymandia.
They’d make more money by investing in Israeli desalinization plants and turning their country into the world’s largest date farm.
Will one of the PRIVATE Investors be SOROS? I hpe so and a MEGA Investor, Mega Partnered with Bu-BA Bill & Hillary, I Hope!
Do you realize how many billions of dollars' worth of military equipment we sold to Saudi Arabia, which went into the pockets of U.S. defense contractors such as Boeing?
Do you realize that during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, U.S. Air Force fighters flew out of Saudi Arabia air bases?
Do you realize that for the decade after Desert Storm, when we were enforcing the Iraqi Northern and Southern No Fly Zones, that the sorties were flown out of Saudi Arabia air bases?
Do you realize that Saudi Arabia warehouses pre-positioned equipment for the U.S. Military, including M1 tanks, ammunition, fuel, and supplies?
Do you realize that total foreign aid to Saudi Arabia in 2015 (the latest date with available figures,) was 237 thousand Dollars, not exactly budget busting?
One can make a tidy living proposing mega-projects.
They don’t have to actually amount to anything, just spend a few years doing research and making impressive-looking proposals to impressionable friends & clients of the patron.
A $500B mega-project? Well, if you find super-rich movers & shakers interested in such a thing, you can talk them into spending 1% of 0.1% of that total cost - a mere trifle of $5M for such big plans - to spend a year working out the high-level details. You keep busy studying an interesting project and making applause-eliciting presentations, probably enough to keep discussion & money coming for another 5-10 years.
For this one, the land is practically free (he11, we’re talking an area that doesn’t even bother delineating national boundaries on maps), solar power is a given (bright constant sun, on-site energy independence, major current fad, inherent shade a bonus), air- and sea-ports aren’t a big issue, and lots of potential investors with so much money they don’t know what to do with it. Get in some skilled self-righteous city planners dazzled by the prospect of playing God (or SimCity) with a mega-metropolis, start laying out basic infrastructure, and by the time the project collapses you & your dozen staff have made enough for a very comfortable retirement.
that’s not an alfalfa field ...
Good translation.
“The Saudi’s own alfalfa farms in western Arizona and along the Colorado River. The hay goes into a container and is shipped to dairies in Saudi Arabia.”
stupid is as stupid does ...
1. the cost to ship a bale of alfalfa or hay that far is orders of magnitude more than the value of said alfalfa or hay. back during the hay shortage of in Texas a few years ago, i asked some farmer friends of mine if they could ship their surplus hay to Texas and make a killing because hay prices were multiple times higher at the time in Texas than in Colorado, and they told me that even by rail for such a short distance that the transportation costs would be overwhelming and eat up any possible profit.
2. it would be far cheaper for the Saudis to maintain their dairy herds in the U.S. and ship the milk to their country.
Great, we can send all the Muslim refugees in Europe there.
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