Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) called its top stakeholders together for a rare public announcement last month.
Hailing from Japan, the United Kingdom and other nations invested in the nation's core industry, the executives crowded into a dark hall for the unveiling of Das Crude, a new blend of oil to be marketed to refiners in Asia next year.
In a nod to the past, the name was taken from the offshore island that saw off the nation’s first oil tanker four decades ago, a moment commemorated in the ceremony hall’s black and white photographs of a young country on the brink of prosperity.
The UAE’s 42-year journey from a nascent oil exporter to a deep-pocketed investor in clean energy seems rapid in hindsight.
In that time the nation’s energy ministry has been led by only three men.
Suhail Al Mazrouei, the current minister and who was appointed this year, is the first with international experience at a foreign company, having worked at Royal Dutch Shell and at Dolphin Energy, where he was a director.
Mr Al Mazrouei's background represents Abu Dhabi's new priorities: rather than a passive partner reliant on foreign fossil fuels expertise, it wants to become a global player, and not just in oil but also in solar, wind and nuclear.
Today, government-owned companies are leading the world’s first new nuclear programme since Russia’s Chernobyl, drilling for oil on the frontier of Iraqi Kurdistan, exploring for gas in east Africa’s highly anticipated gas deposits, and investing in the world’s biggest offshore wind farm, the UK’s London Array facility.
The commercial developments are underscored by efforts on the broader global stage.
Abu Dhabi is targeting increasing its oil capacity to 3.5 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2017 from 3 million today to maintain its role in Opec as a swing producer, alongside Saudi Arabia.
The UAE has played an active role in the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear regulator based in Vienna, and this year Abu Dhabi welcomed its first permanent representatives to the International Renewable Energy Agency, the UN renewables body that is the first international organisation to be headquartered in the Middle East.
In international climate-change negotiations, this country has broken away from an Opec-led stance to obstruct caps on emissions that could hurt oil revenues, and instead pressed – successfully – to include carbon burial, a fledgling waste removal technology, on the list of techniques developing countries can use to earn carbon credits.
The changes are not only at the global level.
Today, talented female Emiratis are entering the capital's dedicated women's college for petroleum engineering at the Petroleum Institute and its MIT-affiliated clean technology university, the Masdar Institute. When they graduate, they will be recruited not only by Adnoc but also by Mubadala Petroleum, Abu Dhabi National Energy – known as Taqa, Masdar and foreign oil majors hungry for local talent.
Major oil and gas projects inside the country are underway, such as the Arabian Gulf's second planned commercial carbon capture project, in which industrial emissions are buried in a bid to help curb global warming.
A pipeline connecting the emirate’s onshore fields to Fujairah, allowing crude to bypass the potential bottleneck of the Strait of Hormuz, is not yet fully operational but will help to fuel an entire petrochemical and trading industry in the mountainous emirate.
Abu Dhabi is also building a terminal at Fujairah that will enable the importing of liquefied natural gas to help meet growing power demand.
On the renewables front, the Middle East’s largest concentrated solar power array is operating at Shams 1 in Abu Dhabi, and the deployment of solar panels on city rooftops could take off if Dubai and Abu Dhabi enable long-anticipated feed-in tariff systems that would allow residents to sell excess power to the grid.
The manufacturing capability for solar equipment is also developing, with a panel factory in Fujairah and a recently announced solar-glass production facility in Dubai. Work is also beginning on the country’s first waste-fuelled power plant.
The developments in new energies ultimately hinge on how Abu Dhabi manages its oldest resource. This country’s two main oil concessions, one onshore and one offshore, are due to expire next year and in 2018, and the Government has yet to make a formal decision on the future.
Onshore partners from the UK, US, France and the Netherlands – legacies of a Second World War carve up of the wider region – are today battling against companies from Norway, Russia, China and other newcomers.
The new offshore contract, which is to last for 40 years, will ask partners to deploy some of their best technologies to ultimately pump 70 per cent of oil from the reservoirs, a recovery rate that is twice the industry norm.
Even as the UAE adopts new energy, many of its biggest technological advances may well occur alongside those in its old industry, fossil fuels.
ayee@thenational.ae