Case Study: Masdar City: Life beyond Petroleum

Margaret Robertson

The United Arab Emirates is a hot and dry country where petroleum has generated fabulous wealth for residents. Using proceeds from this one-time extraction of oil deposits as financial capital, Abu Dhabi, one of seven emirates, envisions a transformation of its role, from a world leader in petroleum production to a world leader in energy in a world without petroleum. As part of this vision, Masdar City ‒ a mixed-use, compact, zero-waste, zero-carbon, car-free city powered by renewable energy ‒ is rising from the desert (Foster + Partners 2007). The driver that has made financing this city possible, petroleum, is being replaced by a new generation of energy sources.

Working with the World Wildlife Fund, the government of Abu Dhabi has developed the Masdar Initiative to align with One Planet Living sustainability standards. The One Planet Living principles, all ten integrated into Masdar City, include zero carbon; zero waste; sustainable transport; sustainable materials; sustainable food; sustainable water, habitats, and wildlife; culture and heritage; equity and fair trade; and health and happiness (World Wildlife Fund 2008).

If any place on Earth seems appropriate for staying indoors within sealed, air-conditioned buildings, it is here, in an extremely hot desert climate where average summertime temperatures hover above 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. But the planners and designers have chosen to go a different direction, bringing together limited air conditioning with passive cooling strategies that require no additional water or energy.

Buildings, streets, and urban spaces are carefully oriented and configured to maximize cooling and minimize energy use. Solar exposure of paving is minimized, as are reflective walls on buildings that might magnify the solar radiation reaching streets below. The orientation of buildings and streets blocks hot winds during the day but allows cooling breezes to enter at night. Some buildings are set as close as 10 feet apart, with ground floors stepped back under colonnades along short streets. This traditional Middle Eastern form shields spaces from sunlight and helps to accelerate air movement, reducing the demand for air conditioning. When air conditioning is needed, it is powered by renewable energy generated within the city.

Buildings use night flushing and stack ventilation to pull air through interior spaces. At night, cool air is drawn in; during the day, thermal mass helps to keep temperatures stable. Wind towers or wind catchers, vertical shafts with vent openings on top which pull cooling air through the space below, are a traditional cooling strategy in the Middle East. They are used to cool Masdar City’s public spaces; water mist is sprayed from the top of the tower, where evaporative cooling and moving air help to lower perceived temperature for people at the tower’s base. Buildings provide foyers as thermal transition zones, so that residents do not feel a thermal shock when moving between indoors and outdoors; rather they acclimatize gradually, allowing them to feel relatively comfortable at indoor temperatures around 86 degrees Fahrenheit (Taylor 2008).

Outdoors, designers placed parks and public spaces three levels below the streets. These “urban wadis,” protected from the sun by building overhangs and canopies of native desert trees, become reservoirs for cool air. Cool seawater from 40 to 46 feet below the water’s surface runs through what designers call cool-water flush canals. In addition, very slight temperature differences between deep, cool seawater nearby and the air at street level are used to drive heat exchangers. Open spaces are woven throughout the city to provide coolness, cleaning of air, and connection to nature. Surfaces are used with care. Horizontal non-walking surfaces, including roofs, are covered with native green plants which can be irrigated with brackish well water mixed with graywater. Cold plates embedded in public walkways provide radiant cooling underfoot, while cool mist stations provide evaporative cooling from above.

Masdar City does not have viable freshwater sources, and all water supplies brought in use desalination (Novotny, Ahern, and Brown 2010: 571). In Masdar City, 80 percent of the water used is recycled (ibid.: 568). Stormwater, graywater including cooling-tower condensate, and even blackwater are treated and then used for irrigation, toilet flushing, district cooling, and other uses. Dashboard panels inside buildings allow inhabitants to track how much water they use, along with other characteristics including carbon footprint.

Ninety-nine percent of the city’s waste is recycled or recovered (Bellini and Daglio 2008: 296). The city turns organic waste into compost to build soils, recovers or recycles nonorganic waste, and has plans to use the remainder to produce power in a waste-to-energy plant.

Masdar City is car-free, with no petroleum-powered cars allowed inside. Every dwelling is located within a short walking distance of a transportation hub. An innovative public transportation system known as Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) uses small, driverless vehicles powered by electricity and guided by magnets. Electric-power light rail lines cross the city and connect it with nearby regions.

Solar photovoltaic panels are used throughout the city, and a photovoltaic solar farm outside the city generates 10 megawatts of power while avoiding carbon dioxide emissions (Masdar Clean Energy 2012). A utility-scale, parabolic-trough concentrating solar power plant, also located outside the city, generates 100 megawatts of power (Novotny, Ahern, and Brown 2010: 570). The Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, a cooperative program between Abu Dhabi and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a graduate and postgraduate teaching and research facility which is part of Abu Dhabi’s vision to become a world leader in post-fossil fuel energy.

The technologies in Masdar City are not new. Solar panels, waste-to-energy plants, graywater reuse, passive cooling, electrified public transit, and other strategies are all used already in other parts of the world. What is innovative about Masdar City, however, is that not just some but all of these strategies are brought together in an integrated, cohesive urban system.

Sources

Arup. “Masdar City.”http://www.arup.com/Projects/Masdar_City.aspx

Bellini, Oscar E. and Laura Daglio. New Frontiers in Architecture. Vercelli, Italy: White Star, 2008.

BioRegional. “One Planet Living: United Arab Emirates Endorsed Community—Masdar City.” 2008. http://www.bioregional.com/oneplanetliving/uae/masdar

CH2M HILL. “Water Portfolio Management: Understanding Challenges Around the World.”CH2M HILL, 2008.

Crampsie, Siân. “City of Dreams: Abu Dhabi Is Pinning Its Economic Future on Innovative, Renewable and Low-Carbon

Energy Technologies.” Engineering and Technology, vol. 3

no. 15 (September 2008): 50–55.

Foster + Partners. “Foster + Partners Create the World’s First Zero Carbon, Zero Waste City in Abu Dhabi.” Press release, London, 2007.

Hartman, M., M.B. Knell, and J.W. Witherspoon. “Masdar City’s Integrated Approach to Sustainability.” In Proceedings, Cities of the Future 2010 conference, March 7–10, 2010, 104–17.Cambridge, MA.

Madichie, Nnamdi O. “Irena Masdar City (UAE) Exemplars of Innovation into Emerging Markets.” Foresight, vol. 13 no. 6 (2011): 34–47.

Masdar City. http://masdarcity.ae/en/

Masdar Clean Energy. 2012. http://www.masdar.ae/en/energy/

Nambiar, Sona and Joann Gonchar. “Masdar Institute.” Architectural Record, vol. 199 no. 5 (May 2011): 130.

Novotny, Vladimir, Jack Ahern, and Paul Brown. Water Centric Sustainable Communities: Planning, Retrofitting, and Building the Next Urban Environment, 566–73. New York: John Wiley, 2010.

Taylor, Bill. “Landscape on the Edge: A Cooler and Greener Middle East.” Landscape Magazine ‒ Middle East, issue 14, August 2008.

Vidal, John. “Masdar City ‒ A Glimpse of the Future in the Desert.” Guardian, April 26, 2011.

World Wildlife Fund. “WWF, Abu Dhabi Unveil Plans for Sustainable City.” 2008. http://www.panda.org/index.cfm?uNewsID=121361

WSP. Masdar City Case Study. London: WSP Group, 2009.

Group Activities

Click to download.

1. Energy Return on Investment exercise

   Submitted by: Anthony Richardson, RMIT University, Australia

   Activity description

   Scatter Easter eggs or some other chocolate treats in a range of hiding places, including some that will require considerable effort to retrieve. Make sure there are large numbers of chocolates in some locations and very few in others. When participants arrive, give them a certain amount of time to collect the chocolates. Work out who has won the Captain of the Chocolate Industry Award for the exercise. Complete the activity by getting people to indicate on a mud-map the location of the goodies they retrieved.

   Discussion questions

   1. How much of your bounty was retrieved from near or more distant hiding places?
   2. What would be a rough estimate of the time taken to retrieve each item?
   3. Who won the Captain of the Chocolate Industry award and why did they succeed?
   4. How does this exercise relate to Energy Return on Investment (EROI) calculations?
   5. How does the exercise relate to recent trends in oil exploration?

 

2. ‘Progress or Apocalypse’; views of the future

   Submitted by: Anthony Richardson, RMIT University, Australia

   Description

   An activity designed to get students to think about the images or ‘narratives’ of the future they have been exposed to and those that they most identify with (and why!). Start by playing these three clips, which all outline a particular view of ‘the future’:

   1. Mad Max 2 opening credits - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4xs5FDHu2E&feature=related 
      (the ‘apocalypse’ view of the future)
   2. Star Trek - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui6g23ygov8
      (the ‘utopian’ view of the future)
   3. Jetsons - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyinD6ZDqeg
      (the ‘more of the same’ view of the future)

   First ask students, in groups, to identify and describe these views of the future: Positive; Negative; Essentially the same as now. Then ask each student to explain to the rest of their group which view of the future they personally find most likely, and why.

   Then get each student in the class (or each group) to come to the whiteboard and enter the reasons for their opinion (whether positive or negative) in one of two columns (positive or negative). Then, as a class, they can start to see what connections there may be between the two columns, e.g. do any elements cancel each other out? The point is to start to see how ‘dichotomous’ much of our thinking about the future actually is, i.e. it lacks subtlety or a willingness to embrace uncertainty.

Recommended Routledge Books

• Supplementary Reading
• Research
• Textbook
• Reference
• Professional

Free Journal Articles

Wei, Hennlock, Johannsson and Sterner (2012) ‘The Fossil Endgame’ Vol 1(1): pages 48-69:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21606544.2011.640849

Strazzera, Mura abd Statzu (2012) Powering the Change : Vol 1(2): pages 146-173:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21606544.2012.692864

Johannes, Eliza, Leo Zulu and Ezekiel Kalipeni, (2010) ‘Oil discovery in Turkana County, Kenya: a source of conflict or development?’, African Geographical Review,

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19376812.2014.884466

Video Links

1. The Energy Crisis and the End of the Industrial Age, Joseph Tainter

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBrYLJV9_N8

   Duration: 1:02.50

   This YouTube video was produced by Legalise Freedom (www.leaglise-freedom.org). It features an interview with Joseph Tainter about his two books, The Collapse of Complex Societies and Drilling Down (written with Tadeusz Patzek).

2. The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUWces5TkCA

   Duration: 53:05

   A 2012 video produced by the US-based Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions (www.communitysolutions.org). It argues that Cuba’s experience in having to deal with the sudden loss of oil supplies following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 shows that local communities are capable of dealing with the gathering global crisis of ‘peak oil’.

3. My Town in Transition, Rob Hopkins

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3L9n20myqk

   Duration: 18:17

   A 2012 TEDxExeter talk by Transition Towns Network founder Rob Hopkins, in which he tells the story of how the town of Totnes embraced his ideas for relocalising food production.

4. The Future of Food in the UK

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR_esVWwpP4  

   Duration: 7:08

   This documentary nicely outlines the connection between food production and energy (in particular, oil). It outlines the concept of Peak Oil and then applies it specifically to food production and distribution. Refers to the Cuban experience.

5. Urban Agriculture, Roman Gaus

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-fHY43qLWs

   Duration: 8:31

   A TEDxZurick talk by Roman Gaus, who surprised himself when he got involved in urban food production. A very popular presentation.

6. Urban Farming: Oakland California

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yYO4L2vegE

   Duration: 12:42

   This video presents the story of Novella Carpenter, who started small in growing food in an abandoned parking lot in the ‘food desert’ of west Oakland before progressing to bigger and better things.

7. First Follower: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ

   Duration: 2:57

   A short video which shows how people can join in an activity that might at first seem unattractive.

8. A 40 year plan for energy, Amory Lovins

   www.ted.com/talks/amory_lovins_a_50_year_plan_for_energy

   A TED talk by Amory Lovins, sustainability advocate.

Blogs and Websites

• Overview of renewable energy worldwide

  GSR REN21 2014 http://www.ren21.net/REN21Activities/GlobalStatusReport.aspx

• Great resource for conservation and efficiency

  http://www.rmi.org/Conservation+vs+Efficiency+Sweaters+Not+the+Answer

• Key background on sustainable energy policies

  http://www.reegle.info/policy-and-regulatory-overviews

• Key background on wind power

  http://www.windpower.org/en/knowledge/windpower_wiki.html

• Key background on solar and biomass technologies

  http://www.irena.org/menu/index.aspx?mnu=Subcat&PriMenuID=36&CatID=141&SubcatID=283

• Key background on energy subsidies

  http://www.iea.org/publications/worldenergyoutlook/resources/energysubsidies http://www.beyondnuclear.org/nuclear-subsidies/

• Excellent resource for those wanting to join the renewable energy community

  http://www.irelp.org

• A blog on Energy Landscapes

  http://www.charting-sustainability.org/

• A website resource produced by the International Energy Agency (IEA) which allows the user to generate Sankey graphs ‒ essentially flow charts showing overall energy inputs and outputs ‒ for the great majority of countries in the world. These are quite useful for demonstrating comparative energy usage for various countries.

  IEA Sankey graphs http://www.iea.org/sankey/

• This valuable website is now defunct but it has been saved in its entirety as an online resource. The archives include articles on energy trends/developments and their socio-political, technological and economic consequences. It can be searched according to country to provide country-specific content. Whilst this material will inevitably date, the website was still active up until 2013 and there are general background articles and resources which are really useful.

  The Oil Drum http://www.theoildrum.com/

• The International Energy Agency was formed in 1973/74 at the time of the first global oil ‘shock’ and its aim has been to examine ways to use existing energy supplies more efficiently while stepping up the search for alternative energy sources. The non-aligned agency has 29 member countries and it provides information on trends in the use of various energy sources. It publishes an IEA Journal.

  International Energy Agency www.iea.org