SIEMENS

Agentle breeze wafts through the narrow alleyways of the Masdar Institute on this winter morning. Marwan Mokhtar, a student, is on his way to the Caribou coffee shop, but takes a slight detour. He walks past his dormitory, the walls of which are covered with curved concrete slabs punctuated by openings that let in light but keep direct sunlight out. A little further on, he passes the library. Here, the exterior walls are lined with insulating gasfilled plastic cushions. Mokhtar walks along the terrace with its view of the desert that is slowly filling up with construction sites.

The Masdar Institute of Science and Technology where Marwan is studying is part of the first phase of Masdar City, one of the most sustainable cities in the world. Projected to eventually accommodate up to 40,000 residents and 50,000 daily commuters, the city is going up near Abu Dhabi’s international airport, in a country that sits on top of nearly one-tenth of the world’s oil reserves and in a place with the world’s highest per capita environmental footprint.

Marwan, who is 24, is pursuing his master’s in mechanical engineering, but the degree program here has little in common with those at many other academic institutions. All 153 students at the Masdar Institute and its 40 or so faculty members are expected to devote at least half of their time to research projects. Most of these projects are focused on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and sustainable technologies. Standing on the terrace, Mokhtar points to a tower off in the distance rising up out of the desert. “My power plant is being built back there,” he says, exaggerating only slightly. “His plant” is a small experimental solar thermal power plant where he is testing a new design.

There is no doubt that Masdar City is a unique urban development project. But it adds up to more than just the large-scale use of pioneering technologies. It is also a gigantic testbed in which these technologies can mature. At its heart is the research-oriented Masdar Institute — a driver and virtual think tank for the entire project. Here, Siemens, which is slated to build a smart power grid and supply high-efficiency building systems, is partnering with Masdar to conduct research into technologies for smart buildings, smart grids and carbon capture and sequestration. Indeed, the company plans to move its headquarters for the entire region to Masdar City in order to have a local presence where things are happening. In addition, Siemens’ Oil & Gas Division has been headquartered in nearby Abu Dhabi since 2010.

21st-Century Silicon Valley. What is being built here in the immediate vicinity of some of the world’s most productive oil wells could become the Silicon Valley of the 21st century and one of the most important innovation centers for green technologies anywhere. Who would have thought that possible just ten years ago? In the first half of the last century, the region’s place on the world economic map was, at best, as a way station for maritime traffic headed toward Asia. Its role changed dramatically in the second half of the 20th century, however. Oil and gas exports brought wealth to the region. The Gulf thus became an important sales market for products from highly developed countries and used its steady flow of income to acquire holdings in companies in Europe, the U.S. and Asia.

The development of the Gulf region’s economic model did not end there. The area is now establishing future-oriented industries on their own soil. These include energy-intensive manufacturing processes such as aluminum production. That the Gulf region is an attractive production location is documented by its high level of direct foreign investment. Saudi Arabia, for instance, has benefitted from nearly €150 billion in investment over the last 20 years. And over the next ten years it plans to double its electrical generating capacity as it continues to industrialize.

Siemens has been awarded a contract valued at over €1 billion to supply twelve high-efficiency gas turbines, generators and steam turbines for the Saudi Ras Az Zawr power station. The plant, which will have an output of 2,400 megawatts, is scheduled to enter service in 2014. Siemens is also building a production and service center facility for gas turbines in Saudi Arabia, which will open in 2012. In the future, local service and maintenance will be managed from there. This investment of several hundred million U.S. dollars is expected to create 1,000 jobs and enable the creation of as many as 3,000 more with local suppliers.

To prepare their own people for a diversified future, the Gulf nations are investing increasingly in education — for example, at the Siemens-supported KAUST University in Saudi Arabia (see Pictures of the Future, Spring 2010, An Oasis of Education). According to Marwan Khraisheh, Dean of the Masdar Institute, “The key to higher productivity is education. Traditionally, education systems in the Arab world have been based on conventional teacher-centered instruction, where the professor is the source of information. But the world of learning has changed.

In the future, professors will act more as guides and advisors for responsible students. That is exactly the approach we are taking at the Masdar Institute.”

Khraisheh is convinced that Abu Dhabi will become a global research and knowledge hub. This will help to achieve the region’s stated goal of manufacturing an increasing number of products based on high technology, and thus preparing it for the day when its oil and gas fields begin to dry up, or when oil simply becomes too expensive for most of us to afford.

Dean Khraisheh has recruited his faculty members from some of the world’s most prestigious universities. For instance, Masdar Institute was established in collaboration with the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and its students are among the best of the best. They come from over 30 countries and have top scores on international standardized admission tests. Many of them would have had a good chance of being accepted at top universities in the U.S.

But Masdar Institute offers some things that even Ivy League universities can’t match. Its students experience the application of the technologies they are researching up close every day — things like a cooling tower, for example, right outside of Mokhtar’s window. Fashioned after the cooling towers in traditional Arabian cities, it takes in air at a height of 45 meters and directs it to the ground. Jets spray mist into the flow of air, and the increasingly cool air sinks further. The fresh breeze spreads out over the entire Masdar Institute campus and makes Marwan’s morning walk to the lab more bearable in the sweltering summer heat. The electricity needed for the system is generated with the help of photovoltaic panels on the roofs of the Masdar Institute and at a solar field, which has a capacity of 10 megawatts.

“I would never have heard about the Masdar Institute if it weren’t for a friend of mine,” recalls Marwan, who studied mechatronics in Amman, Jordan and already had a passion for climate protection. He equipped the cafeteria of his university there with solar panels. At the Masdar Institute, he spent his first year working as a research assistant before beginning his master’s program. “Because the campus is so international, my friends now come from all four corners of the world.” His goal is to become an engineer and build large-scale solarthermal power plants.

Masdar instead of New York. Noura Al Dhaheri is working on a PhD at the Masdar Institute. Two out of every five students at the Masdar Institute are women. “With my grades, I could also have done my doctorate in New York, for example. I had the offers,” says Al Dhaheri who is from the United Arab Emirates. “But I preferred to study here in my home country.” Some of her friends wonder why she is bothering studying a strenuous technical subject at all. Thanks to oil and gas revenues, natives of the wealthy Emirate Abu Dhabi can earn a good living even without high academic qualifications. But as Al Dhaheri says herself, she doesn’t just want a comfortable life. “I want to work toward a future without oil.” She chats briefly with her classmates, and then leaves the Caribou for class.

Abu Dhabi is not the only gulf country with high ambitions — both economic and with respect to sustainability. The 2022 Soccer World Championship will draw the world’s attention to Qatar. This will be an opportunity to show how even in one of the world’s most inhospitable regions a mega-event can be held in a sustainable manner by, for example, cooling the stadium with power from photovoltaic and solar-thermal plants.

As knowledge, labor, raw materials and vast energy resources come together productively around the Gulf, the region is turning into a new and increasingly important hub in the global economic network. The gigantic airports in Abu Dhabi and Dubai testify to this trend.

Cooling and Prayers. The diverse influences that development is bringing to the region have the potential of changing both the countries around the Gulf themselves and their people. The Sheik Zayed mosque in Abu Dhabi, for example, illustrates how traditions that give the region its identity can still hold their own in rapidly changing times. The mosque is the eighth-largest in the world. Its 82 domes of various sizes rise as much as 75 meters into the sky, with minarets reaching a height of 107 meters. The building, whose last sections were completed in 2010 after roughly ten years of construction, can hold up to 40,000 people.

Five times a day the mosque’s air conditioning system ramps up before dropping back down to a lower level. It does so in coordination with prayer times, when the number of visitors increases. To ensure that this happens smoothly and that no pockets of heat or moisture are formed in this complex building, Siemens installed roughly 8,000 sensors, many of them for temperature and humidity — a challenging task, recalls Rajesh Vaswani of Siemens Building Automation. “The numerous domes make it very difficult to compute the air flows in this huge building, to say nothing of the extreme climatic conditions. An additional challenge was that we had to make a particular effort to hide the building systems,” says Vaswani. In the atrium, for example, vents were integrated into the ornamental wall decorations. You have to look twice to even notice that they are there.

The modern and the traditional converge in Sheik Zayed mosque, which is the largest mosque in the Emirates. This also needs to happen in the region as a whole, which is characterized by an abundance of oil and gas on the one hand and by the effects of climate change on the other; by the wealth of many Emirati and by the relative poverty of guest workers; by the increasing aspirations for creativity and high technologies from the region itself and by the simultaneous wish to preserve traditional values and structures.

The future of the region lies in the hands of young people like Noura Al Dhaheri. She and many others are convinced that a future without oil is inevitable sooner or later. “I have a young son,” she says. “I want him to live in a world worth living in and whose ecosystems are intact. We simply have to get away from oil.”