GCC to award over $50bn in oil and gas contracts in 2013

The report predicts that the GCC will award a little over $50bn worth of contracts in the market in 2013, almost double the $27bn expected to be awarded this year.

The pick-up in activity will be good news to contractors which have suffered from a slowdown in activity since the market saw a record $52bn worth of contracts awarded in 2009.

Since then, contract award levels have dropped as national oil companies evaluated their project plans; in 2010, some $40bn worth of contracts were awarded, while this slipped to just $25bn in 2011, the report noted.

However, while the market is expected to rebound next year, it will be dependent on two major projects proceeding.

"The forecast is predicated around the assumption that the $14bn fourth refinery in Kuwait and BP's $15bn Khazzan tight gas scheme in Oman will go ahead," said Ed James, Head of MEED Insight.

"While Kuwaiti bureaucracy and politics are the main obstacles in the path of the refinery project, the final investment decision on Khazzan will not be taken until the first quarter of 2013 and as such both schemes could suffer from delays," he added.

Developments in Kuwait and Oman are also likely to determine whether the $50bn forecast for 2014 is met as the total includes awards on Kuwait's $18bn clean fuels programme and the proposed $6bn Duqm refinery in the sultanate.

Nonetheless, there will still be a host of other major projects awarded over the next two years, including further contracts on Saudi Aramco's Jizan refinery, major work offshore Abu Dhabi, and new world-scale petrochemical complexes in Qatar, the report said.

The coming two years are also likely to see Korean contractors maintain their dominance of the market. As of September 2012, four out of the top five biggest contractors in the region's oil and gas sector were Korean.

In terms of contracts under execution, the largest was Samsung Engineering at $12.4bn, followed by Daelim Industrial Company at $10.1bn and GS Engineering & Construction at $8.6bn. All picked up substantial new orders in the first nine months of 2012 with Daelim being particularly successful winning work on the Sadara, PetroRabigh 2 and the Kemya elastomer projects in Saudi Arabia.

"Recent contract awards to European and Japanese contractors on the Jizan refinery scheme indicate that Korean firms will not have it all their own way over the next few years," said James. "However, we still expect Korean contractors to remain the dominant force in the market," he added.