Charles Hardeman, an Associate Consultant of GDP Global, is also CEO of Santerre Ltd. (Despite the global financial and economic difficulties, Abu Dhabi is continuing to develop the Masdar Initiative – to pursue “solutions to some of mankind’s most pressing issues: energy security, climate change and truly sustainable human development”.
What’s the PPP angle? Well, the government of Abu Dhabi is putting up $15 billion in seed capital, but the investment arm and Masdar city are intended to be run on a commercial basis, in conjunction with other companies. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is helping with the recruitment and training of faculty. Credit Suisse, the Swiss bank, has invested $100m in the initiative’s clean-tech fund. Foster + Partners, the British architecture firm, has produced the master-plan for Masdar city. BP, the U.K. oil firm, and Rio Tinto, the mining conglomerate, will collaborate on a carbon-capture and storage scheme. Masdar, notes the Abu Dhabi development agency, is working with international partners not because it lacks capital, but because it wants to take advantage of foreign expertise.
The initiative consists of a research institute to develop environmental technologies, an investment arm to commercialize and deploy them, and an eco-city to house these two organizations and to serve as a test-bed for their ideas.
Abu Dhabi accounts for about 8% of the world’s proven reserves of oil. At current rates of extraction, the oil will last for another 92 years. Abu Dhabi’s rulers are not planning to abandon oil and gas initiatives but instead want to diversify the Emirates economy, in preparation for the day it runs out of oil.
Masdar will create an academic institution modeled after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a global manufacturing hub for technologies such as solar power and desalination, and a city of 40,000 people with no greenhouse-gas emissions and no waste. All buildings will be supremely energy-efficient. Water will be recycled to reduce the need for desalination. There will be dew-catchers, rainwater harvesting and electronic sensors to raise the alarm in case of leaky pipes. There will be green spaces, but with drought-resistant plants rather than the usual lawns and flowers.
No cars will be allowed. Instead, people will walk, or take “personal rapid transit”—small vehicles that will run around the city on tracks. Goods will be moved in the same way. The city will be walled, to keep out the hot desert wind. The lack of cars will allow for narrow, shaded streets that will also channel breezes from one side of the city to the other.
There will be wind turbines, solar water-heaters and small waste-to-energy facilities. The whole city is being built on a raised platform, to provide access to the pipes and wiring that would normally be buried underground and to allow the transport pods to zip around without confronting obstructions. That feature will also make it easier to install new infrastructure in future.
However, the city will not produce enough energy to power itself at night, due to its reliance on solar panels. Instead, it will import gas-fired power from Abu Dhabi’s grid, at least until energy-storage technology improves. It will make up for this in its carbon accounting by exporting excess solar power to the grid during the day.
