The Most Expensive Construction Projects Known to Mankind

1. Airport in Al Maktoum

Location: UAE's Dubai Total Expense: $82 billion * Completed Year: 2010 The nearly eight thousand weekly flights that are operated by about 140 airlines that depart from the Al Maktoum Airport each week reach more than 270 destinations. The over fifteen thousand-foot runway was constructed in just six hundred days, and its safety testing took nearly two-thirds of a year longer.

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Al Maktoum Airport, Pinterest, and @chiraggudhka12 Once its development is finished, it will have the capacity to handle 260 million passengers annually, making it ten times larger than Dubai International Airport. As the greatest piece of the Dubai World Central puzzle when completed, the Al Maktoum Airport will occupy an astounding 110 square miles and, like its namesake, Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum, will live on in Dubai for a very long time.

2. The pipeline system in Alaska

Place: Alaska Total Expense: $8 Billion* Completed Year: 1977 The 1973 oil crisis gave rise to a significant spike in oil prices, which gave rise to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, a "pipe" dream. After a little over three years, work on the eight hundred miles of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System was finished in the first half of 1977, and the pipeline was operating at full capacity by the end of the same year. More than seventeen billion barrels of oil are said to have been delivered through the pipeline's eleven pump stations by 2014.

Trans-Alaska Pipeline System ©JT Fisherman / Shutterstock BP, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil make up the  Alyeska pipeline Service Company which is the conglomerate that owns and operates the pipeline. Now operating at only a fraction of its maximum capacity, at one time the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System was showing the ability for the daily production of more than two thousand barrels of oil.