Saudi Arabian Neom project 'uses one fifth of world's steel'
agbi.com
agbi.com
Crude steel production in 2023: 18.88 billion mt. 20% = 3,776,000,000 metric tons.
If you just laid that on the ground in 1 meter square blocks it would cover a 481km² area (steel mass=7850 kg/m³). If you made a 1m² block tower, it would be enough to reach the moon, wrap around it, and start heading back.
Their original planned area is 26,500 square km, though this has been scaled back to 1.5km long.
I struggle to see how 481,019 m³ of steel will fit in an area 1.5km square without being the largest and tallest building ever constructed. If you just made a block of pure steel in that 1.5km square area it's going to be 320m high (about half the height of the world trade center across an area the size of 40 Manhatten blocks).
So nearly 400 million metric tons. (Over a year -- and Neom's construction is a multi-year project.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro...
That's more than India, the US, Japan, and Germany produce -- combined.
This seems wildly implausible. The World Trade Center famously utilized 200,000 tons of steel -- 0.05% of what Neom claims to be using. (Annually, or however they reckon it.)
I think "an official said" is doing quite a lot of work in that opening statement.
At first, I thought it was one of these sci-fi concepts that governments talk about but never execute. But they are doing the project (although they have scaled it down considerably). Have nothing to say really.
I believe the plan is to build the first 2km as a test. Which is still 500m high so just nuts.
The project Corviale in Rome is 1km long as a reference.
So many people said this would be BS and they were right. The 1% remaining is a face saving gesture.
> https://www.statista.com/statistics/650538/leading-steel-imp...
Such a massive import scheme would probably disrupt global steel markets and lead to a price surge, which is not in evidence. If anything, steel prices have decreased over 2024:
> https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/steel
So I don't know how much they're using, but I think we can safely rule out that they're really utilizing anything like 1/5 of global annual production.
Already importing more than a billion tonnes of raw meterial in order to make steel - they have the logistics to move weight and they're not importing steel they're importing iron ore and metallurgical coal to make it and use it.
They're glutting with steel about now and in the near future, their massive city scale housing developments have come to an end and are possibly looking to sell their ongoing production to the Saudi's.
It has been massively scaled down to realistic proportions since, as expected.
And? It's not like the US is a major steel producer with annual production more than 10x less than China's.
My single state alone (W.Australia) mines almost a billion tonne of iron ore per annum, more than (IIRC) 16x the annual peak iron ore production of the entire USofA in it's history.
Rio Tinto(?) is opening another global billion tonne per annum iron ore producer as I type (don't recall the country off hand) and demand for metallugical coal (for making steel, a different type than thermal coal for heat to spin turbines for power) is climbing again.
That aside, I believe you're correct that it's projected demand should Neom go ahead, but even a "short trial" section would use more steel than the world trade centre, the plans are for a "wall" of a city, much wider than a world trade tower and in a continuous strip - the foundations I've seen pictured being dug have a substantial footprint even for a short stretch of something intended to be much bigger.
China is a major outlier, with more than half of global production -- in other words, all other countries combined don't equal China.
Yet India is the number 2 producer, Japan is #3, and the US is #4. Germany is #8 globally, but it has a historically large steel production base, and it's #1 in the EU by far, so I included it in the statement nevertheless.
What I wrote could be restated: "That's substantially more than the total output of the #2, #3, and #4-ranked steel producing nations." It's a hell of a lot.
A four foot tall person arrives.
But there is no such person arriving -- instead, there's an entity claiming to take four feet off the room's total height.
A better analogy would be that there's a room with a feast laid out: A 100-pound side of beef, a few 10-pound roasts, and a host of steaks in various smaller sizes scattered around. The table is laid out for dozens or hundreds. Then a single man comes in and says that he's taking forty pounds of meat. This would be, at best, disruptive -- unless the other guests at the table don't plan on eating much.
Is there?
I wasn't aware the gloabl supply of iron ore and thermal coal was capped at a fixed ceiling.
I'm guessing you've never personally been part of the annual delivery of > 400 million tonnes of raw material. I have.
I'm guessing you've never built out a global database of mineral and energy resources from leases through exploration to production. I have.
I specifically mentioned in a peer comment that another billion tonne per annum iron ore production field was opening .. did you miss that?
The US, German, et al steel production and consumption is so low as they don't use, relatively, much steel.
China's steel consumption grew so high as they built out their infrastructure over the past 30 years. The supply of raw materials grew with demand.
Here, IF the Saudi's go through with their stated intent to spend a trillion+ on a mega city then what happened for China since the 1970's in order to deliver for that demand will happen for the Saudi's over the next two decades (as the ability to hit that scale is now well grounded in practical reality).
They have the money, if this is how they proceed to spend it then the questions are:
* will they import steel or raw materials to make their own steel.
* what impact will this have on the global carbon budget, can they be persuaded to invest in green steel at hundred+ million tonne per annum scale.
It's not the case that they'll be "depriving" others who want steel from a limited supply.
> "The Neom giga-project in Saudi Arabia is currently using one fifth of all the steel produced in the world, an official said on Monday."
The key word there is "currently." It is also, emphatically, not the case. So perhaps the guy misspoke and was making a forecast, but that's not what was claimed.
What might happen a decade hence, if the Saudis build out capacity, is another matter entirely. I don't doubt their ability to spend vast sums of money on steel and concrete. Who knows whether or not they'll go through with it?
I hadn't realised you had taken it seriously. Explains a lot.
Most people in my experience would take all of this as planning and logistics, not as a current reality.
After all, further down:
Neom’s demand for steel meant “we are 20 percent of the global steel market. If you look at our demand in elevators, cement and so on … put simply, Neom is going to be the largest customer over the next few decades,” Al Moneef said.
Where would these people come from? I'm sure they can bribe some people to move there, but how many?
The vast majority of human experience has been tough. Arguably the vast experience of most life is pretty cruel.
Should they just donate the wealth of their country to some other one? Would you like to donate some of your personal income to the nice homeless people outside?
The leaps from people build dumb glass city => world is bad => people building dumb glass city are bad because world is bad aren’t obvious to me.
People need to live somewhere. We don't need - and shouldn't - live everywhere. Where it's burning and flooding, we should stop rebuilding. The Amazon sized forest in the eastern US should be largely regrown.
In that way, they're actually providing a good example. We need to think about future infrastructure for a post-oil, post-climate change world. That's exactly what they're doing.
This is a project championed by MBS himself, and no-one dared telling him it was nonsense. Architects and consulting companies are doing what they do best with these types of pie-in-the-sky project: play along and take the money.
The vision is a nightmare of population control and surveillance. It wants to be sustainable, but go cool nearly 150M m2 of glass walls in one of the most inhospitable hot environment for humans... and tell me this is sustainable.
There are flying pods and glow-in-the-dark sand scapes...
Nothing in that project is energy efficient or makes even little sense. It's a vanity project. The money could have financed real breakthrough in science and engineering. Instead, it's wasted moving sand around. They won't even be able to build and host the 1.5km they now target.
The walls are mirrored, not glass. Even if it were glass, would cooling it use more energy than having most of the population drive in and out everyday and sit in traffic jams on km upon km of concrete? It's even worse in areas where that concrete is placed where vegetation could be doing the job of fixing carbon.
It's sustainable because of the density, and because it's built around public transportation. We should get back to vertical, dense towns and cities that are connected by trains.
They probably mean the planned project would use one fifth of the world's steel but it is currently just a hole in the ground and the project is kind of ridiculous and won't get built as planned - even the Saudis don't have enough money.
Patrick Boyle had an entertaining youtube on it https://youtu.be/Ak4on5uTaTg
Why would a chief investment officer lie about a wildly overhyped project?
At 1% of it's planned length, it's already going to be nothing like the shiny CGI videos. And the Howeitat had to be removed or jailed to build even that. Shameful.
So it's really not that bad /s