UAE’s fossil-fuelled high-tech mirage of a green future

When the invitation got here, I wasn’t positive I ought to go. A tech-focused enterprise occasion conceived in 2006 to brush up the inexperienced credentials of a petrostate appeared like a doubtful factor to spend my time on. However I had been searching for a method to be taught from our non-EU Eurasian compatriots how they understand the world by which we now dwell, so I made a decision to make the leap.

Metropolis of the Future

Just a few hours later and even groggier, a bus took me on a guided tour to Masdar metropolis, Abu Dhabi’s sustainable quarter named after the gulf state’s big renewable vitality firm at whose behest I used to be right here. Development of Masdar metropolis began in 2006. It was supposed to accommodate 50,000 residents and function a mannequin for a zero-carbon metropolis and revolutionise fascinated by the constructed atmosphere.

However the residents by no means got here, and it has now been revamped as a start-up valley.

The one path to get there’s by freeway which cuts by means of Khalifa metropolis, a walled-off working-class neighbourhood subdivided by blocks of an identical sand-coloured buildings. On the opposite aspect of the freeway, skyscrapers and beachside resorts towered over the low-rise — a mannequin of how to not design a metropolis. “It is the place all of the taxi drivers dwell,” the bus driver from Pakistan advised me. “5 per room. No privateness. But it surely’s okay, sir. There isn’t any corruption.”

Masdar Metropolis was utterly empty once I arrived.

Western-looking cafés and eating places had been all open for enterprise, however there was no clientele in sight. And one restaurant nonetheless had value tags on its furnishings.

Not like just about each different a part of Abu Dhabi, Masdar Metropolis is made for strolling. There may be additionally a small fleet of driverless pods that ferry individuals round, however with occupation charges at very low ranges (just a few thousand individuals work right here in the course of the week), this has reportedly been scrapped.

I’m wondering why they’ve taken me to a spot that by the appears to be like of it has failed so totally. However apparently, US president Joe Biden had visited when he was vp to Barack Obama. “Terribly impressed,” he later tweeted. “A real inexperienced print for cities of the longer term.”

To the moon

After checking some extra eating places for value tags, I used to be ushered right into a showroom full of scrumptious Arabian, French and American snacks. An African man whose job it was to open the door welcomed me. A South-Asian-looking man whose job it was to push the button for espresso gave me espresso. And males carrying white Kandura’s, all administrators at Masdar, sat at a big desk listening.

“We will ship graphene to the moon, all proper?” an American man stated with confidence. He held a bucket of gray matter rigorously taped shut. I had seen it earlier than.

Graphene was first remoted in 2004, and attributable to its properties — it is 200 occasions stronger than metal and would not weigh a factor—it was envisioned to revolutionise building and drastically deliver down the environmental impression of cement. The EU even launched a €1bn Graphene Flagship in 2013, hoping to win “the worldwide graphene race.”

Practically twenty years later, it nonetheless holds that promise however has but to show its value. To not say it will not, however breakthrough applied sciences have a approach of not fairly breaking by means of for many years. Fusion is one other instance. So is inexperienced hydrogen.

That’s the reason I used to be barely unnerved to be taught that the UAE needs to turn out to be a worldwide chief in inexperienced hydrogen and needs to make use of the UN Local weather Summit as a launching pad for this ambition.

Inexperienced hydrogen has been described because the “swiss military knife” of the transition and can be utilized to wash up sure kinds of industrial manufacturing processes. However excessive prices have prevented its growth, and like graphene, it would not exist but outdoors of some pilot initiatives.

Learn up on the UAE’s hydrogen technique right here.

Going all in on inexperienced hydrogen could assist scale up the expertise. But it surely’s a high-risk gamble, and the overtly business nature of this yr’s summit has raised some hairs amongst local weather advocates.

Blue lasers

Because it seems, Europeans and Emiratis view planetary collapse by means of a distinct lens—demarcated by the truth that the EU goes by means of an vitality disaster and the gulf states are experiencing the primary oil growth in over a decade.

It was due to this fact maybe unsurprising when Sultan Al Jaber, an Emirati oil CEO who had simply been elected director of COP28, emphasised financial alternative on the opening occasion. “All of us share the identical local weather,” he stated in opposition to the background of an enormous blue tree fabricated from lasers. “However I consider we will flip the best problem we face into the chance of our lifetimes.”

To realize a “simply transition for all,” he stated, the UAE aimed to set out a path to a “high-growth vacation spot” and make investments its petro-profits in “breakthrough” applied sciences.

To my ears, it appeared fairly primary ‘fixing issues by means of progress and innovation’ fare, however the gulf state has set a tough goal: 100 gigawatts of inexperienced vitality by 2030 (a couple of quarter of the EUs present photo voltaic and wind capability), 25 % of which will likely be used to create ‘inexperienced hydrogen.’

And in response to secretary-general of the World Vitality Discussion board Angela Wilkinson, probably the most highly effective voices in vitality, Al Jaber is the actual deal and a “visionary chief.”

Though Wilkinson admits “throwing cash and expertise on the drawback” won’t resolve all the problems — the UAE has not dedicated to phase-out fossil fuels — she suggests Europe and the US might use their monetary clout as leverage to get the International South together with petrostates to extend their ambition. “International management is about studying what different international locations purpose for and what their tales are, not dominating them and telling them what the reply is,” she stated.

Reverse emissions?

A part of UAE’s story is that it needs to “reverse emissions” and increase oil manufacturing on the similar time, which is why many local weather advocates have sounded the alarm.

Within the coming years, the gulf state has earmarked $127bn [€116bn] in new fossil-fuel manufacturing, which is able to improve output from 4 to 5 million barrels per day by 2027.

UAE officers insist they will compensate for these newly-created emissions by exporting renewables and inexperienced hydrogen. However this declare is not supported by the Worldwide Vitality Company, and local weather advocates have identified there’s nothing new about petrostates hedging on renewables whereas maximising oil income.

In Sharm el Sheikh throughout COP27, petrostates made positive the phasing out of oil and fuel couldn’t be mentioned and held it off the official agenda. However corruption or cynicism could not inform your entire story. It is also concern. “With out oil, we’ve nothing,” a delegate from a gulf state advised me.

The issue is that it would not matter. In a widely-shared rant, former US vp Al Gore talking (or yelling) on the World Financial Discussion board in Davos, Switzerland, final week, reminded the room the planet solely offers in laborious limits and irreversible tipping factors. There isn’t any room for tales and excuses, he stated: “We’ve got acquired to cease utilizing our ambiance as a sewer.”

Windmills

On my approach again, I seemed out for The Final Exit. I had discovered the windmill overlooking the rust-and-petrol-themed restaurant was a reproduction of a Nineteenth-century mannequin produced by the Aermotor Windmill Firm.

The corporate nonetheless exists and is now owned by a bunch of fiercely patriotic west Texas rangers. Though a small participant within the vitality sport these days, when it was first launched within the Eighties it reworked rural life in the USA. First as an irrigation system and later as a supply of electrical energy, till it was made out of date by the onslaught of low cost oil and fuel by the mid-Twentieth century.

It made me consider the little-known prehistory of renewables that existed earlier than the fossil period. Just like the solar-energy system that impressed judges on the 1878 World Exposition in Paris by creating ice with the ability of the solar; like early electrical automobiles that outcompeted petrol-driven fashions and had been unfold broadly sufficient to have had their very own ‘golden age,’ low cost modular Aermotor windmills inform the story of a historical past interrupted.

As a schooled historian, I’ve discovered historical past can act as an antidote for hype, and I used to be reminded to not put an excessive amount of credence into the necessity for breakthrough applied sciences to avoid wasting the day. We’ve got however to choose up the thread that has been there all alongside. Though if we had, the United Arab Emirates most definitely wouldn’t have existed.

EUobserver was in Abu Dhabi as a part of an expenses-paid journey by Masdar Clear Vitality.