Spanish engineering is once again at the centre of the largest natural gas investment cycle of the past decade. On 13 August, Técnicas Reunidas notified Spain’s securities regulator (CNMV) that it had accepted a letter of intent for the development of onshore facilities for the reception, processing and export of gas in the Middle East, worth approximately 1.43 billion euros (around 1.65 billion dollars).

The scope covers the full onshore treatment chain: the reception systems for the produced gas, the processing and conditioning trains, and the facilities associated with its export. All of it is to be designed and executed to international standards of safety, operational efficiency and environmental sustainability, in line with the requirements that the region’s major operators now apply as a matter of course.

The award comes barely two weeks after the company published its first half 2026 results, a set of figures that confirms how solid the current cycle is. Between January and June, Técnicas Reunidas booked 5.873 billion euros in new awards (54% more than a year earlier) and lifted its order backlog to 13.938 billion euros, a record in the company’s history. Sales reached 3.061 billion euros (up 12%) and net profit stood at 59.1 million euros. Guidance for the full year points to more than 8 billion euros in new awards.

The most revealing figure for the sector is the breakdown by activity: natural gas already accounts for 57.4% of sales, against 25.9% for upstream and refining and 15% for petrochemicals. It confirms that gas has consolidated its position as the dominant vector of the energy transition in the Middle East, where projects such as the Ruwais development in the United Arab Emirates, awarded by ADNOC and ExxonMobil for more than 5 billion euros, set the pace of global contracting.

For the engineering network that supports the major EPC contractors, the message is clear: the coming years will demand detail engineering capacity, documentation discipline and teams able to absorb workload peaks without losing traceability or technical quality.

Sources: Técnicas Reunidas filing with the CNMV (13/08/2026), Reuters, El Español, Estrategias de Inversión, El Periódico de la Energía and Industria Química (31/07/2026).

At DAPIN we have spent 35 years supporting cycles like this one through detail engineering, FEED, structural calculation and project monitoring. When gas sets the pace, technical rigour still makes the difference.