McDermott International picked up two offshore gas contracts in recent weeks worth as much as $1.75 billion combined, one from ADNOC in the UAE and one from Eni off Cyprus. For a contractor that spent the back half of the last decade restructuring, that’s a meaningful quarter.
The Umm Shaif package 4 award
The larger award, worth more than $1 billion, covers package 4 of ADNOC’s Umm Shaif integrated gas cap and surface pressure boosting project. Umm Shaif is a gas layer sitting on top of an oil reservoir that has been producing offshore Abu Dhabi since 1958. ADNOC and its partners took final investment decision in July on the roughly $6.2 billion development. The state company holds 60%, with TotalEnergies, Eni and China National Petroleum Corp. splitting the rest.
McDermott and the Qingdao McDermott Wuchuan consortium in China will deliver the complete scope for a new surface pressure boosting facility, including fabrication and installation of a jacket and topside. The company says the finished topside will rank among the heaviest offshore modules ever installed in the Middle East. Fabrication runs 24 to 36 months at the Qingdao yard, with McDermott’s UAE offices handling engineering and project management. Worley did the front-end engineering design.
Package 4 takes output capacity to 600 million standard cubic feet per day, about a tenth of UAE daily consumption. Later phases could push it to 1.5 billion.
Cronos: a gas hub outside the Persian Gulf
The second contract, from Eni Cyprus Ltd. and worth up to $750 million, develops the Cronos field in the eastern Mediterranean. Cronos was discovered in 2022 and is estimated at 3 trillion cu ft. Strategically it matters more than its size suggests: it gives Eni a production hub well away from the Strait of Hormuz, which is the sort of geographic hedge that European buyers have been paying for since 2022.
What two awards say about offshore EPCI capacity
Heavy offshore fabrication capacity is finite, and the yards that can build a record-weight topside can be counted on one hand. McDermott booking both packages inside a few weeks suggests the company is filling Qingdao well into 2028. Owners planning offshore work in that window should assume the queue tightened.
It also puts a U.S. contractor at the center of two national gas strategies at once. Compare the domestic side of the same trade, where Bechtel just closed out trains at Cheniere’s Gulf Coast facilities. Gas EPC work is where the backlog is.