Billion dollar investment for zero population abandoned oil town
Billion dollar technology investment for abandoned oil town
When the oil bubble burst in the 1980s, the town of Hobbs in Lea County, New Mexico was abandoned by it’s jobless residents. Popular bumper stickers asked the last person to leave ‘to switch the lights out’.
Now the town will be the location for a new scientific facility, ‘The Centre of Innovation, Technology and Tests’, the first of it’s kind for the development and testing of numerous state-of-the-art products for the town of the future with an investment budget of $1 billion. Researchers will make use of the town’s infrastructure to test automated and ‘people-less’ appliances and products such as self driving cars.
However, the revamped abandoned town will not have any permanent residents.
