Building a Global Offshore Footprint

Founded in Abu Dhabi in 1984, ZMI initially built its business around supporting the UAE’sUAE growing hydrocarbon sector. Over the following decades, it has expanded across Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Iraq, and other international markets.

A key strategic move was its investment in jack-up barges, self-elevating offshore platforms capable of supporting construction, maintenance, and decommissioning operations in complex marine environments.

Today, ZMI operates 44 jack-up barges, the largest fleet of its kind globally, alongside more than 196 offshore support vessels. That scale gives the company unusual versatility, allowing engineering capabilities once deployed primarily for offshore wellhead installations and brownfield maintenance in the Gulf to be increasingly applied to subsea cable installation, turbine foundation support, and offshore wind construction.

In practical terms, offshore expertise developed in the hydrocarbons sector is now being adapted to support renewable deployment, underscoring how existing industrial capabilities are shaping the broader energy transition. At a time when geopolitical volatility has exposed vulnerabilities in global energy systems, the ability to apply proven offshore expertise across multiple energy sectors is becoming increasingly important.

“We view the offshore wind market as a long-term investment play for us,” Ali said in our interview. “Our assets, our expertise, our competencies allow us to shift between oil and gas and renewables. They're complementary for both markets.”

Offshore Wind as Strategic Expansion

ZMI’s recent entry into the United States offers a clear example of that broader shift. Through operating HEA jack-up assets, the company is supporting Ørsted’s Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind projects off the U.S. Northeast coast, two of the country’s most significant offshore wind developments.

Breaking into the U.S. market meant navigating strict regulatory requirements, from Jones Act compliance and U.S. Coast Guard approvals to a complex mobilization process involving multiple authorities.

For many operators, those hurdles remain difficult to overcome. For ZMI, establishing itself in the U.S. was about more than entering a new market: It demonstrated the company’s ability to operate across different regulatory environments and apply its offshore expertise to both traditional and renewable energy projects.

As governments place greater emphasis on securing domestic supply chains while balancing decarbonization goals with energy security concerns, that kind of operational flexibility is likely to become increasingly important.

In many respects, offshore wind itself is becoming part of a larger strategic equation, one where energy transition is increasingly shaped not only by climate ambitions, but also by national security considerations and supply chain resilience.

ADNOC’s Broader Maritime Strategy

ZMI’s growth also reflects ADNOC Logistics & Services’ wider ambition to build a globally integrated maritime, logistics, and offshore infrastructure platform. “Our key aim is to be the world's leading maritime energy service provider on a global scale,” Ali says, adding that the U.S. Is a key market for ZMI. “It’s the US, it's Latin America, it is Asia, it's Africa, it's Europe, while ensuring that our key markets, which is the UAE and the surrounding neighbors, are always going to be our number one priority of focused growth.”

Since acquiring ZMI in 2022, ADNOC L&S has significantly expanded its global reach, growing revenue from approximately $2 billion in 2021 to roughly $5 billion by FY2025 while broadening both fleet scale and service capabilities.

The company now operates more than 340 owned vessels, with an additional 600 chartered or operated annually across five continents. Its portfolio spans crude shipping, LNG, gas carriers, global commercial pools through Navig8, and offshore marine services.

In today’s increasingly uncertain geopolitical environment, where trade routes are shifting and energy security has become a growing priority, that integrated scale offers strategic and commercial advantages.

The Infrastructure Behind Energy Diversification

Much of the public debate around energy transition still centers on fuel sources, whether oil, gas, wind, hydrogen, or solar. Offshore, the reality is more practical. Building and maintaining large-scale energy infrastructure at sea depends on marine engineering, regulatory know-how, specialized fleets, and decades of operational experience.

As supply disruptions and national security concerns play a larger role in shaping energy policy, those capabilities are becoming more important.

While energy transition is often framed as a climate or technology issue, offshore it is also about infrastructure, execution, and the ability to deliver reliably at scale. In that environment, the companies likely to have the greatest long-term influence may be those defined less by what they produce and more by the infrastructure they can build, maintain, and deploy consistently.

For ZMI and other peer companies, Ali says that evolution is already well underway, as offshore operators increasingly apply legacy marine engineering capabilities across a broader energy mix that now spans both conventional hydrocarbons and large-scale renewable infrastructure.

Instead of treating this energy addition and diversification as a departure from legacy capabilities, the offshore sector is increasingly demonstrating that existing industrial expertise may prove essential to enabling both traditional energy security and future diversification.

Rather than a complete break from the past, offshore infrastructure and energy innovation is evolving into a broader industrial system where marine infrastructure and operational capability may prove just as important as the energy resources themselves.