NEOM Construction Villages — 50,000 m³ of SuDS

The project

NEOM is a planned region in the northwest of Saudi Arabia, born from Vision 2030 — a development across roughly 26,500 km² on the Red Sea coast. To house the workforce building it, NEOM established large construction villages, each requiring robust stormwater infrastructure from day one. NGS KSA was engaged to deliver the stormwater drainage solution for one of these villages, working with consultant ECG, technical advisor WPS, and main contractor Al Fanar.

The challenge

Initial plans called for open ponds to manage stormwater — a traditional approach that consumes valuable surface area, demands ongoing maintenance, and carries health, safety and evaporation concerns in a desert climate. The client needed a faster, cleaner, more space-efficient way to manage surface water that could be installed at pace alongside an active construction programme, returning stormwater to the ground close to where it falls.

The NGS solution

Guided by the NGS technical team, the client moved away from the pond approach and adopted NGS AquaCell 1050 for soakaway and infiltration. Installed beneath the village, the modular cells let surface water infiltrate back into the earth, with a flexible shape that creates a larger effective drainage area and faster clearance with minimal maintenance. Using a value-engineering approach early in the design, NGS reduced the required tank size in line with the client's data — controlling cost while integrating up to 400 m³ of product per day.

The outcome

As the first AquaCell installation in Saudi Arabia, this introduced a new water-management solution into the Kingdom and opened the door to future NGS KSA work. By choosing AquaCell over a traditional concrete system, the client reduced both installation time and overall cost, while NGS delivered a premium-quality solution to an iconic NEOM project.

"The opportunity to collaborate with such an influential client and iconic project was the perfect introduction to working in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for NGS."

Project partners