Saudi Arabia, a green energy leader?

This week’s cover story almost didn’t happen.

When Taylor Luck, the Monitor’s Middle East reporter, first heard that Saudi Arabia was attempting to “go green,” he wasn’t sure what to make of it.

As the world’s second-largest producer of oil, Saudi Arabia is “often seen as the spoiler to progress on climate,” he says. So the Gulf nation’s commitment to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2060 through investment in renewable energy and reforestation was both intriguing and a bit dubious. “It was just kind of hard to believe,” he says.

So, Taylor flew to Riyadh from his home in Jordan to see for himself.

Some of what he found confirmed his skepticism. The kingdom isn’t giving up its hold of the global oil market – far from it. Saudi rigs continue to pump oil out of the desert for global distribution. But at the same time, Taylor found a nation striving to become a global leader in renewable energy technologies, particularly green hydrogen, a low-carbon energy source that could be a game changer for transportation and heavy industry if it can be perfected.

Some of that investment in renewable energy is intended to offset emissions associated with continued oil production. But the fruits of the Saudis’ research and development in this sector will inform technological progress in other nations as well. 

“Maybe the net-zero carbon equation might not be reached,” Taylor says. “But at the end of the day, I could see that there were real positive steps, and that other people could benefit.”

And out in the countryside, Taylor started to see sprigs of hope beginning to blossom, as he toured several reforestation efforts working toward the audacious goal of planting 10 billion trees. 

“I have to admit that I went in thinking that they were just going to be importing a bunch of trees and planting them and just walking away,” he says, pointing to similarly bold reforestation efforts elsewhere in the world that failed to adequately take the local climate and ecosystems into account.

Yet here Taylor met “lifelong tree-huggers” who were tapping into the private seed banks and extensive knowledge of the region’s dynamic ecosystems that they had been cultivating for years.

What’s more, it appears to be working.

Taylor visited a dam that had been built just this winter and found that “one little pool of water” had sprouted trees. Birds and butterflies were already fluttering around this new oasis. 

“One thing that really struck me was, even in the arid areas, life can be brought back,” Taylor says. “I think that’s an important lesson: There always is a chance to kind of bring life back, and it comes back very quickly.”