Alaska and United Arab Emirates Share Focus on Energy and Generational Resilience

“You can see that, through our history and pragmatism about where we selected land and for what purposes, we are able to accomplish all those different aspects of maintaining our culture and peoples’ place,” Schutt said. “Our leadership cares very much about where we’re from; we have 20,000 Alaska Native shareholders and they all care about both that land but the same list of issues: education, jobs, healthcare.”

Maskari said his mission is similar. The UAE declared independence from a British protectorate on December 2, 1971, just sixteen days before the US Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. His grandmother, Her Highness Sheikha Azza Bint Saif Al Maskari—the matriarch of the Al Maskari tribe—founded the company now known as Al Maskari Holding in 1968. She helped transition the UAE economy from one reliant on agriculture, fishing, and pearl diving to one based largely on oil (discovered in Abu Dhabi, the largest of the emirates, in 1958). Today the company controls a diverse portfolio of subsidiaries, joint venture partnerships, partnerships, and private equity.

“As a family that has so many of our tribal members working both in the public and private sector but not necessarily in a for-profit family business, which is a distinctly different legal structure,” Maskari said, “I think my role in the third generation of that leadership is to ensure that we are creating a very big tent and we are ensuring that there is stakeholder agreement across all of those constituencies.”

The spirit of helping his country transition to the next logical step, as his grandmother did, carries on. Today, with a focus on moving toward net zero emissions by 2050, UAE is emphasizing sustainability and education.

“The populace is really part of that journey,” Maskari said. “It’s the stewardship of not only the people but ensuring that they have an ability to create those futures for themselves. An example of that is our leadership’s call that learning about AI is going to be almost a necessary skillset for that future generation. We can do that in classrooms, but we need to also be consistent with the values at home.”

Maskari notes that his mother, Her Excellency Shaikha Al Maskari, from whom he learned and eventually took over the family business, was the first woman engineer and geophysicist in the UAE. Working as an Emirati in the national oil company at that time “was quite contrarian,” he noted; 90 percent of the UAE population is its non-citizen workforce. She studied for her doctorate in the United States and spent time in Alaska conducting field research—perhaps the first Emirati to visit Alaska.

“I recall stories from my mother talking about her interactions with the [Alaska] Native people, the commonality and the kinship, the focus on family, and the focus on responsible stewardship for the environment. I learned about your state firsthand from someone who came here to learn from you, to help grow with you. And I feel a sense of responsibility now coming full circle: as a private investor, how can we help bring some of our capital to help unlock that Alaska opportunity set?” Maskari asked.

Sustainable Investing

All three UAE representatives at the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference underscored the country’s eagerness to invest in and help develop energy-related projects in Alaska and the United States.

Hussein El Gaafary, head of Energy, Environment, and Water initiatives at the UAE Embassy in Washington, DC, told the audience that, after meeting with President Donald Trump and his advisors earlier this year, UAE leaders committed to investing $1.4 trillion in the US, equivalent to about four years’ worth of the country’s entire gross domestic product. UAE currently has invested $70 billion in energy projects across the US, from traditional to renewable. During Trump’s May visit to UAE, the country announced it will increase energy investments in the US to $440 billion by 2035, creating a significant economic impact and supporting 500,000 American jobs. The energy investment is expected to happen within sectors such as AI, infrastructure, semiconductors, energy, and manufacturing.

Martina Strong, US Ambassador to UAE, noted the similarities between UAE’s and Alaska’s emergence in the energy sector. Oil was discovered in the UAE just a year after it was discovered in Alaska at Swanson River on the Kenai Peninsula in 1957.
“Since then, Alaska and the UAE have become pivotal players on the energy stage,” she said.

UAE is today the seventh-largest oil-producing nation, with a capacity of 4.85 million barrels of oil per day, she said. Alaska, by contrast, produced in 2024 an average of 461,000 barrels of oil per day, part of the US production of 13.2 million barrels per day, making the United States the largest global oil producer, accounting for about 13 percent of total production. The US has held the leading position for the past six years.

Strong noted that the UAE is planning for the day when the last barrel of oil is drawn and shipped.

“UAE is focused on future-proofing or diversifying its economy. The Emirates are very focused on ensuring that they are prepared for a post-carbon future, and that they are prepared in terms of energy,” she said, noting that UAE is investing in and building out sectors that UAE leaders believe will drive growth: AI, basic life and health sciences, and renewable energy.

“UAE wants to work with the US and our private sector to power this rapid-expanding architecture and power it as efficiently as possible,” Strong said. To that end, Emirati AI development holding company Group 42 Holding Ltd. partnered with Microsoft to invest $1 billion in a geothermally powered 1-gigawatt data center in Kenya, the largest single private-sector digital investment in Kenya’s history.

“This is really just one of the announcements you will see coming out in the near future,” Strong said.

In a question-and-answer session following Strong’s Thursday lunchtime presentation, Governor Mike Dunleavy asked her the question he asked frequently throughout the conference: What did you learn?

Strong replied, “For me it’s less about lessons learned and more about the opportunities. It’s very clear that there is so much happening here in Alaska, in terms of deploying some really creative techniques, deploying some really great new technologies or planning to deploy new technologies. I’m going to take some of that back as I meet with my Emirate counterparts and describe what’s happening here, so maybe the lessons will be flowing toward the UAE. But what I mean by opportunities is really for cooperation and partnership.” Strong added that the UAE has had a long history of investing in projects in the United States, particularly in renewables but also traditional energy projects.

One idea Strong took away was how rural communities in Alaska use microgrids. The Middle East has many small communities that were once oases, where connections to the national electrical grid are fragile, if present at all. Using Alaska’s microgrids as a model might prove useful both there and in Africa, where UAE is investing, she said.

Wrapping up the discussion, Dunleavy asked what the balance should be between old and new energy technology both in the UAE and the United States. Strong said a phrase she heard at the conference, an “all of the above” approach, was her takeaway: investing in new technology and older technology.

“For the United States to be secure both from the national security perspective, economic security perspective, and energy security perspective, we cannot afford to fall behind, so we really need the ‘all of the above’ approach, and keep investing, keep innovating and keep doing what is happening here in Alaska,” Strong said.