Oman has signed ten agreements worth about OMR 3bn ($7.5bn) for new projects in the Special Economic Zone at Duqm, spanning green hydrogen, power generation, battery anode materials, gas liquids processing and housing. The zone's refinery, container terminal and dry dock now give it an industrial base rather than a single anchor asset.
Oman has signed ten agreements and memoranda of understanding covering about OMR 3bn, some $7.5bn, of new projects in the Special Economic Zone at Duqm, the largest single package of commitments the zone has attracted and one that spreads across five distinct industries rather than clustering around the refinery that anchors it.
The biggest item is the second and third phases of Acme's green hydrogen and ammonia project, at OMR 1.6bn. Behind it sit an OMR 350m power plant by Al Sahel Power Company, an OMR 288m natural gas liquids separation and treatment plant developed with the state energy group OQ, an OMR 192m plant making anode materials for electric vehicle batteries, and an OMR 30m residential city of 500 units for employees of Jindal Steel. The investors behind the agreements come from China, India, South Korea, the Philippines, Germany and Egypt alongside Omani state and private companies.
The composition matters more than the headline number. Duqm spent a decade as a zone with one serious asset and a great deal of empty land. What was signed this month is the first package in which the industrial logic runs sideways as well as down: a gas liquids plant that feeds chemical production, a power plant that supplies both, a battery materials plant that has no connection to hydrocarbons at all, and enough permanent workforce to justify building a town.
The anchor remains OQ8, the Duqm Refinery and Petrochemical Industries Company, owned equally by OQ and Kuwait Petroleum International. Built for 230,000 barrels a day at a cost above $9bn, it reached full rates in February 2024 and has since run consistently above nameplate, at roughly 255,000 barrels a day. Its products, including naphtha, move out through dedicated storage and export berths in the Port of Duqm rather than by road or pipeline to the north, which is the whole point of siting it where it is.
That geography has stopped being an abstraction. Duqm sits on the Arabian Sea, roughly 600 kilometres south of the Strait of Hormuz, and cargo leaving it never enters the Gulf. With the strait closed to routine commercial traffic through much of this year, a location that was previously a slide in an investment presentation has become a commercial fact that shows up in operating numbers.
The clearest example is ship repair. Asyad Drydock, the 1.2 million square metre yard at the port, has two graving docks able to take vessels of up to 500,000 and 600,000 deadweight tonnes and completed repairs on more than 230 vessels in each of 2024 and 2025. Drydockings in the first five months of 2026 were more than 10 percent up on the same period last year. The yard's pitch is that it sits directly on the Asia-Europe and Asia-Africa routes and spares operators the detour into the Gulf; that argument has rarely been easier to make.
Container handling has been built out on the same reasoning. The Asyad container terminal at Duqm has a quay of more than 1,000 metres across three berths, yard capacity of 26,000 TEU and more than 600 reefer plugs, sized for transhipment and for the industrial cargo the zone itself will generate rather than for Omani consumer imports, which Sohar and Salalah already serve.
What has not changed is the gap between signature and steel. Most of what was agreed this month is an investment agreement or a memorandum, not a sanctioned project with contractors appointed and financing closed. Acme's expansion is an investment agreement covering phases that follow a first phase not yet operating. The battery anode plant, the power station and the gas liquids facility all still have to pass through engineering, permitting and final investment decisions, and Gulf industrial zones have a long history of announcing more than they build.
The evidence that Duqm converts better than average is the refinery, the dry dock and the terminal, all of which exist and work. The evidence that it does not is the amount of allocated land in the zone that has been allocated for years. The next two years, in which several of these agreements either reach financial close or quietly lapse, will settle which pattern the zone is following.
For now, Oman has assembled the combination that industrial zones usually lack: deepwater berths, an operating refinery, spare power and water capacity being built, a workforce settlement under way, and a location that does not require passing through a contested waterway to reach a customer.