this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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They have deserts for solar energy and cheap workers. What else do they need?
Food and fresh water
Desalination is cheap enough for human consumption. It can be too expensive to grow food but food can be imported.
I would actually love to see Saudi Arabia take the lead on food engineering. They might lack fresh water, but they have immense amounts of land and sun to play with.
The only alternative I can see is a mass reforestation project.
Unfortunately what they are doing is buying Agri land abroad and repatriating the goods.
Capitalism 🤷♀️
That's why the Saudi's aren't going to piss off the US, China, Russia, or India. Their strategy only works in peacetime.
Well the Americans bend over for them and the Russians need them more, it's only China they have to behave for.
Solar powered greenhouses and desalination.
It's hard to load solar energy on oil tanker.
Joke apart, how would they make money with solar energy? Oil is a very limited resources that can be transported very easily. Every country in the world needs oil but only a few country can supply it so the business model is extremely straight forward: export oil to the countries that has the money to buy it.
Now what is the business model with solar energy? Every country in the world has sun and electricity is hard to export over long distance so what are they doing with it ?
They can do anything, from data centers to any industrial production line. At worst they recycle aluminum.
Not every country has that much sun and the space. You don't want to clear forests or farmland for solar energy.
The cost of running a data centre in the desert would become cost prohibitive at the drawing board stage.
Link it with desalination and it becomes an advantage.
Hydrogen Production would be the logical thing.
The workers aren't cheap.
Don't they use third world migrant workers?
They do, but it only works as long as you can subsidize the locals with oil wealth to either not work or work in non-productive jobs.
The native Emirati population in Dubai is only ~300k while the total population of Dubai is ~3,500k. You can sustain that in a single city, but you can't sustain that throughout an entire region.
Saudi Arabia has a population of 32M with an immigrant percentage of 42%. To reach Dubai's ratio, Saudi Arabia would have a population of ~218M. That would be near Brazil or Nigeria. It would also require the country to expand to be able to support an additional 186M.
Neom. What do you think they are doing? They don't have to go to 218M but why shouldn't they? Whoever manages to have the next level of urban density first will dominate innovation and attract the brightest minds.
I don't know if shiny infrastructure alone will attract bright minds.
It won't. There is also no guarantee that they will succeed. But I believe that they are trying.