The Line is on track, says top NEOM official
CONSTRUCTION NEWS
NEOM has just silenced doubters with a double dose of good news: it demonstrated global confidence in the $500-billion giga-project taking shape in northwest Saudi Arabia by securing a SR10-billion ($2.7 billion) financing facility, while its Chief Operating Officer addressed media speculation on The Line, a cynosure of the world, head-on in his latest LinkedIn post.
“Despite the incorrect media reporting, it’s another record month on the Line with our excavation numbers. The project is getting close to final reduced piling levels with dewatering ramping up to capacity,” said Giles Pendleton, in Part 14 of his post titled “NEOM is Real”, disproving the ‘naysayers’ again.
The post indicated that work is in progress on the excavation of four modules – 44 to 47 of The Line, which is expected to comprise 135 modules that will be 800 m long and 500 m tall at sea level.
“The masterplan for the Line remains at 170 km as we have always spoken about and we have always maintained it will be built in phases. We are working on Phase One which we will launch later this year. Nothing has changed. Imagine trying to build 170 km or a city for 9 million people all at once, that’s like building New York or London in one go. It’s impossible,” he commented.
This comes amidst recent reports of scaled-back ambitions for the project, particularly The Line, a planned 170-km-long, glass-walled city. Bloomberg in a recent report, citing ‘people familiar with the matter’, stated that Saudi Arabia has downsized its medium-term ambitions for the development.
It added that while the government at one point hoped to have 1.5 million residents living in The Line by 2030, now officials expect the development will house fewer than 300,000 residents by that time. With the latest pullback, officials expect to have just 2.4 km of the project completed by 2030, said the report quoting the source.
