Egypt’s state-run Petrojet and Enppi have beaten out global rivals for a six-year contracting framework with Oman’s biggest oil and gas producer, worth more than $6 billion in future work. The prize opens the door to Petroleum Development Oman’s entire project pipeline for the next six years, engineering, procurement and construction work reserved for just four qualified contractor groups worldwide.
Cairo is calling the win proof of Egyptian engineering credibility abroad. Look at the past twelve months of contract filings and a bigger pattern appears: Petrojet and Enppi have stacked deal after deal across Oman, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, each one landing while Egypt fights to rebuild the dollar reserves its economy nearly ran out of.
Four Alliances, One Six-Year Prize
Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), the sultanate’s largest oil and gas exploration and production company, runs its EPC contracting the way Saudi Aramco runs its Long-Term Agreement pool. PDO structured the competition around two tendering tracks known internally as Wave 1 and Wave 2, covering greenfield and brownfield work at its Block 6 concession.
Egypt’s petroleum ministry said Sunday that the Petrojet-Enppi consortium was one of only four global alliances and contractors that made it through prequalification. Winning a framework slot does not guarantee any single contract. It guarantees a seat at the table for a six-year run of tenders covering a portfolio the ministry values above $6 billion.
The ministry framed the win in familiar terms: part of a strategy to support the expansion of petroleum-sector companies abroad and grow exports of engineering and technical services, and a deal that opens new horizons for partnership between Cairo and Muscat. That language has appeared in Egyptian government statements for years. What changed is the evidence behind it.
A Dollar Crisis Turned into a Business Plan
Egypt is coming off its worst currency crunch in a generation. The Central Bank of Egypt devalued the pound three times, and in January 2023 alone the currency lost roughly 40 percent of its value, sliding toward 31 pounds to the dollar officially and near 40 on the parallel market.
That crisis is easing, and petroleum diplomacy is doing some of the heavy lifting. Petroleum Minister Karim Badawi said the government expects to clear its remaining arrears to foreign oil firms by June 10, after cutting the overhang from roughly $6.1 billion in mid-2024 to about $440 million by May 2026. The Egyptian pound has been quietly strengthening too, with the dollar slipping toward 51.79 pounds on the buy side, a decline of more than a pound and a half since late May.
Egyptian business outlet Enterprise put it plainly when covering Enppi’s first Oman contract with PDO in May: state-owned and private heavyweights alike are chasing stable, long-term streams of foreign currency in neighboring markets as mega projects slow at home. Industry watchers described that same Oman award as a strategic breakthrough for a sector hunting regional market share, not just a friendly handshake between two energy ministries.
A Year of Rolling Wins
The July framework did not appear out of nowhere. It caps roughly a year of steadily larger Egyptian contract wins across Oman’s energy sector, each one raising the stakes for the next.
- December 2025: Petrojet signs a $273 million deal with OQ Gas Networks (OQGN) to build a 193-kilometer gas pipeline, plus a $250 million contract covering the first phase of a planned hydrogen pipeline network, announced during a round of ministerial meetings at Oman’s Green Hydrogen Summit.
- January 2026: Badawi meets a delegation from France’s Technip Energies to discuss a joint venture with Enppi and Petrojet, targeted for completion by the end of June.
- May 2026: Enppi lands its first Oman contract directly from PDO, a $355 million turnkey award to triple gas-processing capacity at the Birba Gathering Station in Dhofar.
- July 2026: The Petrojet-Enppi consortium is named one of four qualified alliances for PDO’s six-year, $6 billion-plus EPC framework, the largest Egyptian win in Oman to date.
Stack those numbers together and the picture is one of acceleration, not a single lucky bid. Each contract has been bigger, broader or more strategically placed than the one before it.
Egyptian Contractors Are Squeezing Out Bigger Rivals
The May contract is the clearest evidence that Egyptian firms are winning fights they used to lose. Enppi and India’s Larsen & Toubro Energy Hydrocarbon (L&TEH), part of the sprawling Larsen & Toubro conglomerate, went head to head for the Birba project’s main EPC contract. Greece and Lebanon’s Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC) and Abu Dhabi’s NMDC Energy both submitted technical bids too, then withdrew before the finish line, according to MEED’s reporting on the two-way fight for the Budour-Northeast Birba award. Enppi walked away with the contract.
That single result lines up with a broader shift. The table below traces how quickly the scale of Egyptian wins in Oman has grown over the past eight months.
| Contractor | Omani Counterparty | Project | Value | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Petrojet | OQ Gas Networks | Fahud-Suhar gas pipeline plus hydrogen pipeline phase | $523 million | December 2025 |
| Enppi | Petroleum Development Oman | Budour-Northeast Birba gas project | $355 million | May 2026 |
| Petrojet-Enppi consortium | Petroleum Development Oman | Six-year EPC framework agreement | $6 billion-plus portfolio | July 2026 |
Enppi already executes turnkey pipelines, gas plants and refinery work across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and parts of Africa, and shows up in Engineering News-Record’s global contractor rankings. Petrojet runs active branches in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria, Libya, Iraq and the UAE. Oman is simply the market where the growth is now most visible.
What Does Oman Get from the Deal?
Oman gets more than pipelines and processing stations built on schedule. The framework requires the consortium to train Omani engineers, transfer technical know-how and widen the role of local suppliers, tying the contract to the sultanate’s own economic diversification goals under Oman Vision 2040.
The consortium’s obligations, as described in the agreement, run in three directions:
- Technical expertise transfer, embedding Egyptian know-how in complex oil and gas project execution within Omani institutions.
- Training of Omani engineering cadres, building a domestic workforce capable of running future projects independently.
- Deeper local supply chain participation, routing more of the $6 billion portfolio through Omani vendors rather than imported inputs.
That is not unusual for Gulf megaprojects; Saudi Aramco and ADNOC both attach similar local-content strings to their own contractor pools. It does mean the very companies training Oman’s next generation of engineers are the same ones hoping to keep winning that work for six more years.
Egypt’s Next Bet Is a Regional Engineering Hub
Oman is one piece of a wider board. Enppi and Petrojet are already partners on a $1.2 billion LNG pre-conditioning project for Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) in the UAE, and Enppi is separately building natural gas liquids storage tanks for Saudi Aramco. Badawi has toured that Abu Dhabi site directly, calling outside work by petroleum-sector firms a reflection of their engineering capability.
The Technip Energies talks point toward the next step. A joint venture combining Technip with Enppi and Petrojet is meant to build a leaner entity for front-end design and construction work, both inside Egypt and beyond it, while keeping local content high.
Six years is a long runway. If the framework delivers anywhere close to its $6 billion ceiling, Oman will have handed Egypt’s petroleum engineers their biggest single foreign order yet, right as the pound finally starts to hold its ground.
