According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the Gulf countries have some of the largest carbon footprints per capita in the world. Cheap gasoline, huge highways, the need for constant air conditioning and water desalination all contribute to this notorious ranking. But some Gulf states are looking to change that.
At the forefront of this development is Abu Dhabi, with its $15 billion Masdar Initiative, aimed at developing new forms of energy, from solar power to hydrogen power plants. The cornerstone project is the Masdar City — a $22 billion “carbon-free city” on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi city.
“We’ re trying to show a model for sustainable living that is independent of fossil fuel,” said Khaled Awad, the director of Masdar’ s Property Development Unit.
According to Awad, the self-contained city will be home to around 50,000 people, and 1,500 “green energy” oriented businesses. No cars are allowed in this pedestrian city. Anyone who commutes will park their car in garages on the outskirts and use mass transit: there will be an overhead train, in addition to a “personal transit system” below ground, which is akin to a horizontal elevator.
To make the streets bearable in the searing summer heat, Masdar City architects Foster and Partners borrowed from the design of traditional Arab cities. Narrow streets, shaded by solar panels and trees, will weave among tightly packed buildings.
“We’ve been keen to look at history, where people naturally evolve technology, thinking, planning for themselves, in these extreme conditions,” said David Nelson, Foster and Partner’s Head of Design. “So the buildings being close together, that’s the kind of knowledge that was empirical knowledge that existed let’s say three hundred years ago.”
Eco-innovations
But to engineer a self sufficient, zero-carbon emitting city in the middle of the desert, the designers have had to be creative. They are planning two wide swaths of trees that will cut through the city, to allow moist air from green space on the outskirts to cool the urban center. Recycled waste water will irrigate it, which will also serve as an area to grow food for the city. Buildings will produce energy as well as conserve it: each roof will be topped with solar panels. Those solar panels will power the building’s air conditioning and provide shade by hanging over the narrow streets. The city’s main power source will, naturally, come from the abundant sunlight.
Masdar City’s ground breaking took place on February 9, 2008, although engineers have been testing an array of solar panels since December 2007. The first building that is planned to rise from the site will be the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology – developed in cooperation with Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Foster and Partner’s Nelson said Abu Dhabi wants to be the Silicon Valley of sustainable energy.
“That’s why, in the Masdar Initiative, the very first piece will be the university,” he explained. “The curriculum is to study everything on and around the issue of a sustainable future.”
Abu Dhabi, which sits on around 9% of the world’s oil reserves, might seem an unlikely candidate to promote sustainable energy. But some experts predict the emirate’s petroleum production is expected to peak in 2012 and then start to decline. So Abu Dhabi is trying to look beyond that. Environmental groups have praised the emirate for the Masdar plan, but they note that the rest of the city has done little to decrease its carbon footprint. There is no mass transit and building codes for energy efficiency do not exist.
“There’s a lot of things they could do that aren’t as ‘sexy’ as developing new energy resources and building a whole new city,” said Kateri Callahan of the Washington-based Alliance to Save Energy. “But there’s no reason that the rest of the buildings (in Abu Dhabi) shouldn’t be done more efficiently built than (they are) currently being done now.”
In a literally shining example, as the World Future Energy Summit took place in January in Abu Dhabi, the building housing the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority stayed lit up all night, every night. The architecture incorporates bright lights shining from each floor. It looks great, but must consume enough energy each night too power a village.
Although these contradictions abound when talking about sustainable energy in the Gulf, Abu Dhabi is trying. The emirate’s efforts include funding a new $3.5 billion “Desert Islands” eco-park on eight islands off the coast, and funding several green buildings as part of the Masdar Initiative, including the Masdar company headquarters. And in the spirit of GCC competition, other member states are initiating their own green building and sustainable energy projects.
At time of writing, Bahrain had just installed three 29-meter wind turbines on the yet to be completed Bahrain World Trade Center Towers. UK-based designers Atkins say the aerodynamic shape of the two towers will channel wind from the Gulf into the turbines, which will provide 15% of the building’s energy needs.
“This project has given us great optimism for the future because we have clearly demonstrated that we can create a commercial development which is underpinned by an environmental agenda,” said Shaun Killa, Chief Architect at Atkins and designer of the Trade Center.
Green Architecture
Atkins is very active in the green building trend in the Gulf. The firm has partnered with the British University in Dubai to create a Masters Degree in the Sustainable Design of the Built Environment — where many new ideas on building “green” are originating.
Some of those ideas have flowed into current designs, including the cooling system for the Burj al-Arab, and there is ongoing research into ways to more efficiently cool buildings through the use of “district” cooling centers that would provide water cooled by gas power to whole clusters of buildings, instead of each building providing its own cooling system. Also, developers are working with ideas on shading, positioning, and using solar technology to capture the sun’s energy.
Some planned and under-construction buildings are already flaunting their use of these technologies. In Dubai, the designers of the Lighthouse Tower bill it as the first “low carbon emission office building.” The Burj al-Taqa is being promoted as the first zero carbon tower, and will feature a rotating sunscreen that shades most of the building in the day and generates electricity. Qatar has gotten in on the act, with recent news reports suggesting the country is considering building one of the world’s largest solar power complexes, in addition to its development of battery powered taxis and busses in an effort to gear up for an Olympic bid in 2016.
Qatar’s hydrocarbon-centric “Energy City” will include green buildings and a sustainable energy research center, the designers say. Even the world’s largest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia, plans to invest in solar power, the country’s oil minister said in March 2008.
“One of the research efforts that we are going to undertake is to see how we make Saudi Arabia a centre for solar energy research and hopefully over the next 30 to 50 years we will be a major megawatt exporter,” Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Nuaimi told Petrostrategies, a French oil newsletter. “In the same way we are an oil exporter, we can also be an exporter of power.”
Currently, Abu Dhabi and Masdar City seem to be on the cutting edge of the Gulf’s sustainable, green building trend, yet even these multi-billion dollar projects have their limitations.
Critics say a project like Masdar would be difficult to replicate in other parts of the world. The city is being built from scratch, they note, and it is not as easy to modify existing buildings, let along entire cities with millions of structures. Abu Dhabi’s desert climate is a much better location for solar power than, say, Northern Europe. However, Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud, Director of WWF International’s One Living Planet program, pointed out that the fact that one of the world’s leading oil producers is going somewhat green may shame the rest of the world into taking action.
“It hopefully will act as an example of how people can act in future,” he explained. “How people can have all the things they need, and perhaps have some of the things they want, but without it costing the earth.”
