ADNOC-ADQ JV Awards $1.7 Billion Build Contract for UAE Methanol Plant

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ADNOC-ADQ JV Awards $1.7 Billion Build Contract for UAE Methanol Plant

TA’ZIZ, an Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. (ADNOC) and ADQ joint venture tasked with establishing a “chemicals and transition fuels ecosystem”, has awarded a $1.7 billion engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for a methanol production facility in the Al Ruwais ecosystem project. Expected to be completed 2028, the plant will be the first methanol […]

Expected to be completed 2028, the plant will be the first methanol production facility in the United Arab Emirates, according to TA’ZIZ. The plant is planned to produce up to 1.8 million metric tons a year of clean energy-powered methanol.

“This landmark EPC contract award is a significant step in realizing TA’ZIZ’s vision to drive the UAE’s industrial growth by creating a world-scale integrated chemicals ecosystem in Al Dhafra region”, TA’ZIZ chief executive Mashal Saoud Al-Kindi said in a company statement. “The plant will enhance the UAE’s position as a leader in sustainable chemicals production and strengthen TA’ZIZ’s role in enabling ADNOC’s global ambition to lead the chemicals sector”.

SAMSUNG E&A Co. Ltd. won the contract. “SAMSUNG E&A will bring its successful experience of a recently completed methanol plant in Malaysia and the active application of its unique execution system, characterized by modularization and automation, to the project”, the South Korean company said in a separate press release.

Hong Namkoong, president and chief executive of SAMSUNG E&A, commented, “We plan to actively leverage local resources and our network of partners based on our extensive regional experience in the Ruwais Industrial Complex, UAE”.

ADNOC and ADQ aim to start producing chemicals in the first phase the Al Ruwais chemicals and transition fuels ecosystem in 2028. The first phase is expected to produce 4.7 million tons a year of chemicals.

Late last year TA’ZIZ awarded over $2 billion worth of EPC contracts for infrastructure components of the ecosystem project.

“TA’ZIZ will produce a range of chemicals, many of which have not previously been manufactured in the UAE, enabling the local manufacture of many new construction, agriculture and healthcare products”, TA’ZIZ said November 6, 2024, announcing the contract awards. “In its initial phase, TA’ZIZ will produce six chemicals: caustic, ethylene dichloride, vinyl chloride monomer, polyvinyl chloride, low-carbon ammonia and methanol”.

NMDC Group won the contract for the chemicals port of the project. “When the port is complete, it will facilitate the export of chemicals and transition fuels, ensuring operational connectivity to regional and global markets and enhancing access to imported supplies”, TA’ZIZ said.

Rotary Engineering-Abu Dhabi was tapped to build the terminal portion, which will have storage facilities, tank-to-jetty pipelines, jetty-to-tank pipelines and inter-site pipelines.

“The dedicated chemicals port and terminal will enable exports from the one mtpa [million tons per annum] low-carbon ammonia production facility and world-scale methanol plant TAZIZ is building in Ruwais, as well as imports of key materials”, TA’ZIZ said.

Al Geemi Contracting won two contracts, one to build utilities including for power transmission, steam and water, and another to build ancillary infrastructure such as internal roads, buildings and security fencing.

TA’ZIZ said of the $2 billion awards, “A significant portion of the value of the contracts is expected to flow back into the UAE’s economy under ADNOC’s In-Country Value program, boosting economic growth and diversification in Al Dhafra region”.

“The awards will also accelerate TA’ZIZ’s efforts to establish a domestic low-carbon chemicals supply chain, while supporting ADNOC’s chemicals growth strategy and ambitions to become a top five global chemicals player”, it added.

TA’ZIZ was launched November 10, 2020, by ADNOC and Emirati investment and holding company ADQ.

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Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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