By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL


ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates - With one of the highest per capita carbon footprints in the world, these oil-rich emirates would seem an unlikely place for a green revolution.

Still, the region’s leaders know energy and money, having built their wealth on oil. They understand that oil is a finite resource, vulnerable to competition from new energy sources.

So even as President Barack Obama talks about promoting green jobs as America’s route out of recession, gulf states, including the emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are making a concerted push to become the Silicon Valley of alternative energy.

They are aggressively pouring billions of dollars made in the oil fields into new green technologies. They are establishing billiondollar clean-technology investment funds. And they are putting millions of dollars behind research projects at universities from California to Boston to London, and setting up green research parks at home.

“Abu Dhabi is an oil-exporting country, and we want to become an energy-exporting country, and to do that we need to excel at the newer forms of energy,”said Khaled Awad, a director of Masdar, a futuristic zero-carbon city and a research park that has an affiliation with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that is rising from the desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.

This new investment aims to maintain the gulf’s dominant position as a global energy supplier, gaining patents from the new technologies and promoting green manufacturing. But if the United States and the European Union have set energy independence from the gulf states as a goal of new renewable energy efforts, they may find they are arriving late at the party.

“The leadership in these breakthrough technologies is a title the U.S. can lose easily,”said Peter Barker-Homek, chief executive of Taqa, Abu Dhabi’s national energy company.“Here we have low taxes, a young population, accessibility to the world, abundant natural resources and willingness to invest in the seed capital.”

The vision of a renewable future in the gulf is rooted not so much in a green sentiment as in analysis of the region’s economic future and the lifestyles of its citizens.

“You see what the gulf states have achieved in terms of modern infrastructure and beautiful architecture, but this has come at a very high environmental price,”said Mr.Awad of Masdar, standing in a field of 40 types of solar panels that the project’s engineers are testing, and using to power offices.

“We know we can’t continue with this carbon footprint,”he said. “We have to change. This is why Abu Dhabi must develop new models? for the planet, of course, but also so as not to jeopardize Abu Dhabi.”

The crown prince of Abu Dhabi announced last January that he would invest $15 billion in renewable energy. That is the same amount that President Obama has proposed investing? in the entire United States?“to catalyze private sector efforts to build a clean energy future.”

Masdar, the model city that will generate no carbon emissions, is tied to the crown prince’s ambitions. Designed by Norman Foster, the British architect, it will include a satellite campus of the M.I.T., as well as a research park with laboratories affiliated with Imperial College London .

In Saudi Arabia, the new state-owned King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust, gave a Stanford University scientist $25 million last year to start a research center on how to make the cost of solar power competitive with that of coal. Kaust, now in its first grant cycle, also gave $8 million to a University of California at Berkeley researcher developing green concrete.

“The impact has been enormous,”said Michael McGehee, the associate professor at Stanford who received the $25 million Saudi grant.“It has greatly accelerated the development process.”

Director of the largest solar cell research group in the world, Professor McGehee had tried and failed to get money from the United States government or American industries to commercialize cheaper solar cells.

With the Saudi money he has hired 16 researchers and expects the new energy cells to dominate the market by 2015.“People are astonished to see how big this grant is and where it came from,”he said, noting that his past grants from the United States government were about $160,000.

With no industrial history, the gulf states say they have the advantage of starting from scratch in developing green manufacturing; countries like the United States are forced to retool ailing industries, like car manufacturing.

Also, although the gulf states have previously showed little interest in green energy like wind or solar, they have another advantage, Mr.Awad noted as he stood in the shimmering desert. “The sun shines 365 days a year,”he said.

Masdar, a model city being built in Abu Dhabi that is designed to generate no carbon emissions, uses recycled rebar, above, and different types of solar panels.PHOTOGRAPHS BY DARYL VISSCHER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES