Building A Line In The Sand
Building A Line In The Sand

NEOM – A City Like No Other

When it comes to construction sites, they don’t come any bigger than NEOM.


By Caterpillar | Posted: January 23, 2023


NEOM isn’t just another construction site. It’s the construction site. A $500 Billion bold, audacious and innovative giga-project. One that will not only challenge how we see, interact and live in cities, but also how sustainably they can be built.

It is impossible to describe NEOM without using superlatives.

NEOM is made up of three core projects. Trojena is a destination resort built around a lake in Saudi Arabia’s snowy mountain range. Oxagon will be the world’s largest floating structure and an industry hub that will service 13% of the world’s trade. And The Line, perhaps the most impressive of all. A totally unique city that stretches over 170 kilometres (110 miles) long and yet is just 200 meters (660ft) wide. 

Building A Line In The Sand
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Building A Line In The Sand


Once built, The Line’s mirrored city walls will be home to 9 million people. Residents lucky enough to live here will be supported by a futuristic infrastructure that will give them access to all their basic amenities within a 5-minute walk. While a high-speed rail link will run the whole length of The Line in as little as 20 minutes.

With neither roads nor cars and 95% of its land preserved for nature, The Line will also be carbon neutral, with a 0% carbon footprint.

As you would expect, with sustainability at its core, there is a strong emphasis on renewable energy, water conservation and reuse, and a circular waste management system that promises zero waste to landfill. While the city itself will be powered by wind and solar panels.

Zahid Tractor, the Cat® dealership in the region, was an obvious partner in this project with its vast network of relationships, local knowledge and expertise in working in the remotest of areas. One of the many services they handle is ensuring the uptime needs of the machines via Customer Value Agreements (CVAs), which include customer technician training, regular maintenance at scheduled intervals, as well as around-the-clock ,and on-demand field and technical support.

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Zahid Tractor has supplied many of the 5,000 tractors, excavators, loaders, graders, and trucks currently on-site, and that number is expected to double over the coming year. All of these will be kept very busy as just the preparation for the foundations alone will involve moving approximately 500 million cubic meters of soil.

Dealing with such large numbers of machines would always be difficult. Still, when you factor into account the complexities associated with such a remote location, the logistical challenge becomes even more extraordinary.

Zahid Tractor’s Strategy Department Head, Omar Sherif, is understandably proud of how they have tackled the job.

In a time when supply chains are as strange as they are, together with Caterpillar, we’ve been able to deliver on this absolutely massive project. And that is quite an achievement.

Omar Sherif


And for those wondering why it is called NEOM? It’s a combination of two words. The first three letters come from the Ancient Greek neo, meaning new. While the M comes from the Arabic word, mustaqbal, meaning future.

 

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