Despite the building boom in the United Arab Emirates, cement companies there are facing lean times and closing their factories, leaving builders to source their projects on the black market. While the price of cement has been capped, the price of inputs - notably natural gas - have not. The higher prices of imported or black market concrete force building costs ever-higher.

Plans are in the works to build a futuristic, carbon-neutral 100,000-resident city in the sands of Abu Dhabi, by the Persian Gulf. The Middle East, awash in oil and dollars, may be the one region on earth most capable of building the first city for a post-oil world. The emirate of Abu Dhabi is pouring billions into renewable- and sustainable-energy technologies, stimulating precisely those industries that ultimately could challenge oil's dominance. "What could be better for Abu Dhabi," says the CEO of the government-sponsored organization leading the initiative, "than investing our oil and gas revenues [in something] that will give us leadership in the future?"