One of the world’s leading oil producers may not be the obvious home for a global clean energy success story. And yet Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates and home to 8% of global oil reserves, also hosts one of the biggest players in clean energy – Masdar.
The state-owned group has quietly built itself in the past decade and a half into a powerhouse that has invested more than $8 billion across 40 countries in projects worth $20 billion, and now has almost 14GW of renewable energy capacity installed or under development.
With the UAE set to host the next-but-one UN climate talks (following Egypt) It is now accelerating its ambitions and aims to have at least 100GW of capacity by 2030. “Masdar is helping to shape the future today,” says Mohamed Al Ramahi, CEO. “We created this sector locally and regionally, and we are among the few that created it globally.”
The group has been beefed up by the addition of the renewable assets of local utility Taqa, the national oil company ADNOC and sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, immediately increasing its clean power portfolio to 23GW.
Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week is when Masdar, which hosts the event, briefly steps into the limelight and despite being Covid-depleted, the 2022 conference was no exception.
It announced plans to expand its operations in Indonesia and to export solar power from a 1.2GW solar project to Singapore, as part of the city state’s plan to import up to 4GW of low-carbon power by 2035, as well as to help fund Indonesia’s first floating solar project.
Masdar, which has invested considerable sums into offshore wind in the UK, also signed an agreement with one of Japan’s largest energy companies, Cosmo Energy, to explore renewable energy opportunities, including in offshore wind, helping Tokyo to meet its target of up to 10GW of offshore wind by 2030, and 45GW by 2040. The companies will also work together on hydrogen and ammonia-related projects, CCUS (carbon capture, utilization and storage), battery storage and energy trading.
Another agreement, with France’s Engie and Fertiglobe, a partnership between OCI and ADNOC, and the world’s largest seaborne exporter of urea and merchant ammonia, will see the creation of a 200MW green hydrogen facility in the UAE to support the production of green ammonia, which could become one of the key ways of transporting green hydrogen to key export markets such as Japan.
In addition, it announced that TotalEnergies would join its initiative with Siemens Energy to produce sustainable aviation fuel from green hydrogen as part of Abu Dhabi’s plans to establish itself as a green hydrogen hub. “The demonstrator plant will help to establish the commercial viability of green hydrogen as an essential decarbonized fuel of the future,” said Al Ramahi.
The conference also saw the publication of a new report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) on the geopolitics of hydrogen, which points out that green hydrogen is set to upend global trade and bilateral energy relations, creating new interdependencies as the trade in oil and gas declines.
The Abu Dhabi-based agency says that hydrogen could cover up to 12% of global energy use by 2050, “with green hydrogen emerging as a game changer for achieving climate neutrality without compromising industrial growth and social development,” according to IRENA Director-General Francesco La Camera.
Clean hydrogen is seen by many fossil fuel producers as an attractive way to diversify their economies, while countries that can generate cheap renewable electricity will be best placed to produce competitive green hydrogen and could become sites of green industrialisation, producing equipment such as electrolysers and fuel cells.
