Abu Dhabi: An Oil Giant Dreams Green

The gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi got rich on the back of black gold, but its planned carbon-free city could represent the future of environmentalism

By Bryan Walsh/Abu Dhabi Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009
    • Foster & Partners

    These panels will help offset the energy used in the construction of Masdar City.

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    Those plans include a thin-film solar factory, along with investments in wind and solar and in carbon-trading projects throughout the world. Most significantly, Masdar is pioneering a model carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) project with the energy and mining giants BP and Rio Tinto that will take CO2 emissions from industry in the emirate and store the CO2 in abandoned oil wells. Since even the most optimistic energy projections assume we'll be burning fossil fuels for decades, perfecting CCS is vital to controlling emissions--and who would be better suited to cleaning up fossil fuels than an emirate that produces nearly 3 million bbl. of oil a day? "It's hugely significant that Masdar is championing this," says Vivienne Cox, BP's head of alternative energy.

    But the heart of the initiative is Masdar City, a community designed for 40,000, set to be completed by 2016, that bills itself as the city of the future. Cars will be banned, so residents will be whisked around the city on a personal rapid transit (PRT) system, an automated cable-car-like network. (The PRT cars, unveiled at WFES, look as if they were stolen from the set of Star Trek.) More prosaically, the 2.3-sq.-mi. (6 sq km) walled community will have a solar-powered desalination plant, and conservation will keep water use 60% below the norm. The city's centerpiece will be the Masdar Institute, a graduate academy that will churn out new experts in clean energy. The hope is that a pool of educated workers--plus Masdar's favorable tax policies--will draw green companies to the desert, where they will be able to test their ideas in an environmental Utopia. "There is a visionary component to it," says Frank Mastiaux, CEO of climate and renewables for E.ON, a German energy company. "Masdar and Abu Dhabi have set themselves incredibly high expectations. Now they have to be delivered."

    For all the limitless funding Abu Dhabi can pour into Masdar, however, success is not guaranteed. Some urban-design experts question just how sustainable Masdar City will really be. The settlement is being built miles outside Abu Dhabi, contributing to the energy-intensive sprawl growing throughout the emirate. And while Masdar City promises to use the greenest technologies on the market, that won't make it livable. "It looks a bit like a prison to me," says Steffen Lehmann, an urban-design professor at the University of Newcastle in Australia who spoke at WFES. "It's going to be a 1% token-green enclave, while the rest of [Abu Dhabi] goes about business as usual."

    And business as usual in Abu Dhabi is extremely carbon-intensive. Gasoline costs less than 50¢ a gal. (13¢ per L), and public transport is all but nonexistent. The World Wildlife Fund says the U.A.E. has the biggest per capita carbon footprint in the world, and parched Abu Dhabi uses more water per person than anywhere else. There are no plans to put a price on carbon, as even the U.S. is considering. Lehmann and others would prefer to see Masdar spend its billions greening Abu Dhabi itself, not building an entirely new settlement in vacant desert. "We have to have every city be an eco-city," Lehmann says.

    He's right, but that doesn't diminish the significance of the Masdar Initiative and its high-tech approach. Environmentalists are slowly realizing that a policy of regulation--so successful in combatting past pollution problems like acid rain--simply won't be enough for global warming. The scale of the climate crisis is too vast, and the world's growth too rapid. What's needed is technological innovation, green solutions as yet undreamt of, to utterly remake the way people use energy. Masdar's crash greening may be the future. "This is real, and it shows that they are thinking ahead in a constructive way," says Nicholas Stern, an influential British economist and advocate for action on climate change. "I'm very optimistic that this is happening." Given the challenge, the world needs all the optimism it can get.

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