ADNOC has said it will award AED200bn ($55bn) of new projects between 2026 and 2028 across upstream and downstream. Days later its chemicals venture TA'ZIZ signed long-term offtake, feedstock and sales agreements worth $28.5bn, and reached financial close on $2bn for the UAE's first world-scale methanol plant.
ADNOC has told its contractors to prepare for AED200bn — about $55bn — of new project awards between 2026 and 2028, a three-year schedule spanning upstream and downstream that amounts to one of the largest single-client construction programmes anywhere in the Gulf.
The commitment was made at the Make it With ADNOC Forum in Abu Dhabi, an event convened by group chief executive Sultan Al Jaber that brought together more than 400 attendees including government bodies, ADNOC's engineering, procurement and construction contractors, and 70 local manufacturers admitted to the company's Local+ list after meeting its technical and qualification standards. The awards sit inside the five-year capital plan of $150bn for 2026 to 2030 approved by ADNOC's board late last year, of which $60bn is earmarked to flow back into the domestic economy through the company's in-country value programme.
The pairing of the award schedule with the Local+ list is the operative detail for suppliers. ADNOC is not simply announcing spending; it is naming the manufacturers whose products EPC contractors are expected to specify first. For a fabricator or valve maker in Abu Dhabi, admission to that list is the difference between bidding into the programme and watching it.
Two days later, at Make it in the Emirates, ADNOC's chemicals joint venture with ADQ gave the clearest indication yet of what a large share of that money buys. TA'ZIZ announced long-term agreements valued at $28.5bn, or AED104.6bn, covering offtake, feedstock and sales across methanol, polyvinyl chloride, ethylene dichloride, vinyl chloride monomer, caustic soda, salt and natural gas. The contracts run from five to 25 years.
That tenor is the point. A chemicals complex of this size is financeable only if both ends of it are contracted well ahead of start-up: the feedstock going in and the product coming out. TA'ZIZ has now done both. On the input side, ADNOC Gas took a 25-year agreement to supply natural gas to the TA'ZIZ methanol project, valued at more than $5bn, and Abu Dhabi's Sama Salt signed a 20-year salt supply agreement to feed the PVC complex. On the output side, the buyers are a mix of industrial users and traders: Emirates Global Aluminium for caustic soda, Mitsubishi Corporation for EDC, VCM and caustic soda, Mitsui and Co for EDC and caustic soda, India's Sanmar Group for EDC and VCM, Tricon for PVC, EDC and caustic soda, and Vinmar for EDC and PVC. ADNOC and Proman take methanol.
The TA'ZIZ Industrial Chemicals Zone at Al Ruwais Industrial City is being built to produce 4.7 million tonnes a year of chemicals when construction completes in 2028. The first phase is expected to contribute AED183bn — about $50bn — to the UAE economy over its life, with roughly 20,000 construction jobs and 6,000 permanent roles.
Alongside the commercial agreements, TA'ZIZ Methanol Company, the venture between TA'ZIZ and Proman, reached financial close on $2bn of financing for what will be the UAE's first world-scale methanol plant. Financial close on a project of that size is a harder signal than an offtake agreement: it means lenders have accepted the construction risk and the revenue contracts behind it.
The gas side of the strategy is moving on a similar timetable. The Ruwais LNG project — two trains of 4.8 million tonnes a year, 9.6 mtpa in total — is scheduled to come on stream by the fourth quarter of 2028, and will be the first LNG export facility in the Middle East and Africa region to run on grid power rather than gas turbines, giving it among the lowest carbon intensities of any liquefaction plant in operation.
Feeding that system over the longer term is the Ghasha concession offshore Abu Dhabi, where ADNOC is now standing up a dedicated operating company, ADNOC Ghasha, to run a development targeting 1.8 billion standard cubic feet a day of gas along with 150,000 barrels a day of oil and condensate. In December, ADNOC, Eni and PTTEP closed structured financing of up to $11bn, or AED40.4bn, against future midstream gas production from the Hail and Ghasha development, with more than 20 international and regional banks participating. The structure raises cash years before first gas, which is not expected until late this decade, and the project is designed to operate at net zero emissions by capturing 1.5 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide.
Read together, these are the two halves of the same argument. ADNOC is converting gas it does not yet produce into liquefaction capacity, chemicals capacity and contracted revenue, and it is doing so with the construction risk parcelled out to EPC contractors and the market risk parcelled out to offtakers on decade-plus terms. The AED200bn award schedule is the mechanism that turns all of it into steel in the ground between now and 2028 — and, for the contracting market in the UAE, the single most consequential number of the year.