Prologue: The Driller's Sixth Sense
There is a particular silence on a drilling rig just before oil flows. Veterans describe it differently ,a change in vibration, a shift in the mud returns, something that registers in the body before it registers in the instruments. One of ADNOC Drilling's early engineers once put it this way, recalled in the company's own institutional memory:
"Drilling was like a symphony of music. If you are feeling this music, this sense, you are a driller. There was so much excitement waiting for that moment of reaching oil or gas, holding your breath. It was like looking for gold."
Abu Dhabi has been listening to that music for more than fifty years , through booms and crashes, through the disorienting speed of its own transformation, through oil embargoes and pandemics and the arrival of artificial intelligence on the drilling floor. And at the center of every well drilled in the UAE, through every chapter of that story, has been one company: ADNOC Drilling.
What began in 1972 as a modest state agency tasked with reducing foreign dependence in oil production has grown into one of the most technically sophisticated drilling companies in the world , a publicly listed, AI-driven, regionally expanding enterprise that in 2025 recorded the strongest financial year in its history. To understand ADNOC Drilling is to understand the UAE itself: how a collection of desert sheikhdoms took black gold and built something that will last long after the last barrel is lifted.
To appreciate what ADNOC Drilling represents, you first need to understand what existed before it.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, Abu Dhabi was not a city. It was a small, sand-bound settlement on a low island in the Arabian Gulf , home to pearl divers, fishermen, and date farmers. The Bani Yas tribe, led by the Al Nahyan family, had settled the island as early as the late eighteenth century, drawn by the Gulf's extraordinary natural pearl beds. At its peak, the pearling industry was the economic heartbeat of the entire Gulf coast. Thousands of men , divers, haulers, boat captains , organized their lives around the short summer diving season, plunging to depths of thirty meters on a single breath, hunting the oyster beds that lay beneath the warm, shallow waters of the Persian Gulf.
Then, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it collapsed. The Great Depression crushed global demand for luxury goods. More decisively, a Japanese entrepreneur named Mikimoto had perfected the technique of culturing pearls , seeding oysters to produce pearls artificially and at scale. Within a few years, the Gulf pearl trade , built over centuries , was economically worthless. The communities that had depended on it were left with almost nothing.
In the early 1930s, the first oil company teams conducted geological surveys in the UAE. It was still speculative work. The oil potential of the Persian Gulf was understood in geological theory, but proving it in the desert required years of fieldwork, drilling tests, and patience. On 5 January 1936, Petroleum Development Trucial Coast Ltd (PDTC), an associate company of the Iraq Petroleum Company, entered into a concession agreement with the ruler.
Then came the expedition that would change everything. In 1937, the founding father of the UAE, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, led an expedition of 16 tribesmen to the south-west of Abu Dhabi, where his vision for the development of the UAE's oil and gas resources was born. At the time, Sheikh Zayed was not yet the ruler , that was his elder brother, Sheikh Shakhbut. Zayed was the governor of the Eastern Region. But he was already something else: a man who understood that the desert held more than sand.
The geological surveys found what the geologists suspected. Beneath the Abu Dhabi deserts and the shallow shelf of the Arabian Gulf lay one of the greatest concentrations of hydrocarbons on Earth. But proving it required drilling. And drilling took time.
In 1958, the wait ended. Oil was discovered at Umm Shaif, an offshore field roughly 75 miles from the Abu Dhabi coastline. In 1959, ADMA's drilling barge struck oil at Umm Shaif, which is located 80 miles into the gulf near Das Island. In 1962 the first shipment of oil was loaded from Das Island. Abu Dhabi's first oil tanker departed from Jebel Dhanna in late 1963, carrying crude that would be refined and consumed in European and Asian markets thousands of miles away.
The transformation began immediately , though it was not without friction. Sheikh Shakhbut, the ruling brother, was cautious about spending oil revenue. He reportedly kept cash in a palace vault rather than investing in infrastructure, wary of the disruption rapid modernization might bring. The result was growing frustration within the ruling family. Perceived mismanagement of the emirate's oil revenues led to the British backing a bloodless coup by Shakhbut's younger brother Zayed Al Nahyan on August 6, 1966.
Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan became ruler of Abu Dhabi on that day. He would govern for 38 years. Under him, everything changed.
Schools, hospitals, roads, and ports rose from the desert floor. Oil revenues were invested into the infrastructure of a modern state. Sheikh Zayed was not building a kingdom , he was building a nation. And that project required energy: secure, sovereign energy.
The federation to be known as the United Arab Emirates was formally established on December 2, 1971. Sheikh Zayed became its first President. A few months later, with the new nation barely a year old, ADNOC was formed. ADNOC came into being in 1971 as the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company under the mandate of Sheikh Zayed. Its mandate was straightforward and enormous: control Abu Dhabi's oil resources, and use them to build the nation.
But there was a problem. Abu Dhabi's oil was being drilled by foreign companies. The rigs, the expertise, the technology , all of it came from abroad. If the UAE was truly to control its own energy future, it needed to drill its own wells.
One year after ADNOC was established, the next step became clear.
ADNOC Drilling was created by Emiri Decree in 1972 as the first fully-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) Group company. It began under the name National Drilling Company , NDC. The mandate was simple and ambitious in equal measure: build a national drilling capability, one rig at a time.
Originally known as the National Drilling Company, the company acquired its first rig, AD-1, in 1973. That first rig , a modest land drilling unit that now sits on display outside ADNOC's headquarters on the Abu Dhabi Corniche , was the beginning. A single piece of equipment. A single crew. An entire country's energy sovereignty resting on what it could do.
The world into which ADNOC Drilling was born was a volatile one. 1973 was also the year of the Arab oil embargo , a geopolitical earthquake that made Western countries acutely aware of their dependence on Gulf crude, while simultaneously reminding Gulf states of the true leverage their resources represented. For Abu Dhabi, the moment reinforced what Sheikh Zayed already knew: sovereign control of the drilling operation was not a luxury. It was strategic necessity.
ADNOC acquired, effective January 1, 1973, 25 percent of the assets of ADPC and ADMA. By a further agreement in December 1974, the ADNOC interest in the ADPC and ADMA concessions was raised to 60 percent. As ADNOC moved to take majority control of the concessions that foreign companies had operated for decades, the National Drilling Company was being built to provide the drilling muscle that would make that control real.
The early years were not easy. The talent simply did not exist in Abu Dhabi. Drilling is a highly specialized industry , it takes years to train a driller, a toolpusher, a drilling engineer. NDC had to build a workforce almost from nothing, bringing in experienced hands from Pakistan, India, and the Arab world, training Emiratis alongside them, and building the institutional knowledge that would eventually make the company self-sufficient.
Those early engineers and rig workers were doing something larger than they perhaps knew. As one of the company's veterans later reflected:
"Every time I walked around the drilling rig helideck, I saw the sea, the sky, the boats, the choppers in the air and the activity we were doing on the rig. I realized how important what we were doing was for the diesel in the ships, the fuel in the helicopters and the lights in Abu Dhabi. Everything we were doing on that rig was a source for this success."
To understand the scale of what NDC was asked to do, you need to understand the fields it was asked to drill.
Abu Dhabi's oil endowment is extraordinary by any global measure. The onshore fields , Bu Hasa, Bab, Asab, Shah, and others , were found in the Al Dhafra desert, flat and featureless terrain broken only by sabkha flats and isolated dunes. They were developed by what became Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Oil Operations (ADCO), with NDC providing the drilling rigs. The offshore fields , Lower Zakum, Upper Zakum, Umm Shaif , lay in the shallow Persian Gulf shelf, some of them close to shore, others far into open water.
Upper Zakum is the centerpiece of this story. Located approximately 84km north-west of the Abu Dhabi islands, the Upper Zakum oilfield has estimated reserves of 50 billion barrels of oil. Upper Zakum is the second-largest offshore oilfield, as well as the fourth-largest oilfield, in the world. The field was discovered in 1963, the same year the UAE was in early formation. Its development , bringing those reserves to the surface in recoverable quantities , became one of the defining engineering challenges of Abu Dhabi's oil industry.
The presence of oil in the field was discovered in 1963, and the decision to develop the field was made in 1977. Production from the oilfield began in 1982. Those five years from decision to production represent the enormous complexity of bringing an offshore giant into operation: designing the platforms, engineering the reservoir drainage plan, drilling hundreds of wells through a carbonate reservoir that required constant attention and expertise.
NDC drilled those wells. And with each one, the company's engineers became more capable, more experienced, more confident in the specific geological formations of Abu Dhabi's subsurface.
Lower Zakum, Umm Shaif, Nasr , each offshore field required its own configuration of drilling rigs, its own campaign of wells, its own engineering solutions to the particular challenges of the reservoir. Onshore, Bu Hasa became one of ADCO's primary producing fields, a vast, complex facility in the western desert where NDC's land rigs drilled continuously for decades.
ADCO was incorporated by ADNOC in 1978 and is responsible for all onshore and shallow coastal water oil and gas operations for ADNOC. The company produces from the following oil fields: Asab, Bab, Bu Hasa, Sahil, Shah, Rumaitha, Shanayel and Dabbi'ya. NDC provided drilling services across all of them.
This was not merely contract work. It was nation-building. Each barrel of oil lifted from those reservoirs funded the hospitals, the universities, the roads, the desalination plants, the airports that transformed Abu Dhabi from a desert sheikhdom into a modern state. NDC's rigs were the machines at the foundation of that transformation.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, NDC had moved far beyond its single first rig. The fleet was growing. The workforce was developing. Local expertise was accumulating. One veteran from the period later noted:
"At first, we thought we would have maybe eight or ten rigs. Now there are over 90, billions of dirhams of assets."
The 1980s - Volatility and Resilience
The 1980s tested every oil company in the world, and ADNOC's National Drilling Company was no exception.
The decade opened with the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution and the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War , a grinding eight-year conflict that added geopolitical instability to an already complex regional picture. Oil prices spiked in the early 1980s, then collapsed. Demand for OPEC oil fell sharply by about 45 percent in the first half of the decade. Producer states such as Abu Dhabi found themselves with large bureaucracies which were slow to respond to changing circumstances.
For NDC, the challenge was maintaining a capable drilling organization through periods of reduced activity while keeping its people and equipment ready for the next upswing. The company's unique position , as the sole provider of rig services to ADNOC's upstream companies, under a government mandate , gave it a degree of stability that purely commercial drillers could not enjoy. Even in downturns, Abu Dhabi's long-term development plans continued. Wells needed to be drilled.
The 1980s also saw the beginning of a process that would define NDC's identity for decades: the deliberate transfer of technical knowledge from international experts to Emirati professionals. ADNOC's broader nationalization and Emiratization agenda required every subsidiary to build local talent. For a company as technically demanding as a drilling contractor, this was a multi-generational commitment.
The 1990s - Consolidation and Expansion
The 1990s brought renewed stability and growth. Global oil demand recovered. Abu Dhabi's fields , particularly the offshore giants , required continued development drilling to maintain and grow production. NDC's fleet expanded steadily. The company deepened its capabilities in both onshore and offshore environments, adding barge rigs capable of operating in the shallow coastal waters of the Gulf.
Wireline services, logging, and specialized well completion services were added to the company's portfolio. NDC was evolving from a pure drilling contractor into a broader well services provider , a shift that would accelerate dramatically two decades later.
By the mid-1990s, the company had drilled thousands of wells across Abu Dhabi's producing assets. It was, in every operational sense, the backbone of the UAE's oil industry. No other company had the depth of experience with Abu Dhabi's specific geology , the carbonate reservoirs, the overpressured zones, the complex structural geology of the offshore fields.
The 2000s - Scale and Sophistication
The 2000s brought the commodity supercycle. Oil prices climbed from the low teens in the late 1990s to above $147 per barrel by July 2008 , a run that transformed the economics of the entire oil industry and sent upstream investment surging globally.
For Abu Dhabi, this period coincided with a major strategic decision. ADNOC announced ambitious production expansion targets, and Upper Zakum was central to that ambition. ExxonMobil joined the Upper Zakum offshore oil field development by acquiring 28% interest in ZADCO from ADNOC in 2006. The partners in ZADCO started exploring artificial island-based development options in the same year, in order to increase the production to 750,000bpd with the use of extended-reach drilling technology.
This was a landmark moment , not just for Upper Zakum, but for the drilling technology that would be required to develop it. Traditional offshore platforms could not efficiently access the reservoir's full drainage potential. The solution was audacious: build artificial islands in the shallow Gulf waters, and drill extended-reach wells of extraordinary length from those fixed platforms.
NDC's engineers would eventually drill some of the longest wells ever attempted in the Middle East from those islands. In 2019, a well drilled from Upper Zakum's artificial islands exceeded 40,000 feet in measured depth , the longest in Middle East history at that point. The technical foundation for that achievement was laid in the 2000s.
The decade also brought the global financial crisis of 2008, which sent oil prices crashing from $147 to below $40 in just five months. For the upstream industry, it was a sharp reminder of commodity volatility. ADNOC's long-term development plans continued , but the importance of operational efficiency, of doing more with each dollar of drilling investment, became increasingly clear.
The 2010s - Transformation Begins
The decade opened with NDC still operating under its original identity. But the changes coming were fundamental.
Following the completion of the UZ750 Project, which had an investment of approximately $10 billion, the production capacity of the field increased from 500,000bpd to 750,000bpd, enabling the field to be sustainable for 25 years. This project required years of intensive drilling from the four artificial islands, deploying some of the most advanced extended-reach drilling technology in the world. NDC was at the center of it.
Then came 2018, and a decision that signaled a new strategic direction.
Baker Hughes, a GE company, acquired a 5 per cent stake in ADNOC Drilling in a deal that values the latter at around $11 billion. The deal represents the first time ADNOC has brought an international strategic partner to acquire a direct equity stake in one of its existing services businesses.
The strategic logic was not simply financial. BHGE will be the sole provider of proprietary leading edge and differentiated equipment and technologies related to the integrated drilling offering, supporting ADNOC Drilling's growth. The company was no longer just drilling wells , it was beginning to offer integrated drilling services (IDS), combining its own rigs with Baker Hughes' downhole tools, measurement-while-drilling systems, and completion technologies into a single contracted package. The old model , rig owner on one side, oilfield services company on the other , was being collapsed into something more unified, more efficient, and more technically powerful.
The company had also dropped its old name. By this point, it was operating as ADNOC Drilling , no longer the National Drilling Company of 1972, but something recognizably more ambitious in its self-description.
On October 3, 2021, ADNOC Drilling listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange.
The numbers were stunning. Demand from local and international institutional and retail investors resulted in the IPO being oversubscribed 31 times, raising more than US$1.1 billion and making it the largest ever listing on the ADX. On its first day of trading, ADNOC Drilling's shares jumped 30 percent , an extraordinary debut for any company, in any market.
The offering size was increased from 7.5% to 11% of total issued share capital on September 22, 2021. Even at 11%, the appetite from investors , global institutional funds, regional family offices, and UAE retail investors , was overwhelming.
Why such enthusiasm? Several factors converged.
First, the fundamentals were strong. ADNOC Drilling was the largest drilling company in the Middle East by fleet size and the sole provider of rig services to ADNOC , a relationship protected by long-term contracts and the strategic importance of drilling to Abu Dhabi's production capacity targets. At the time of listing, the company had a fleet of 96 owned rigs. Revenue for the first nine months of 2021 was $1.7 billion, up 12 percent year-on-year.
Second, the strategic context was compelling. ADNOC had announced a target of increasing crude oil production capacity to 5 million barrels per day by 2030 , a 25 percent increase from existing levels. Every barrel of additional production required additional wells. Additional wells required drilling rigs. ADNOC Drilling was, structurally, a direct beneficiary of its parent company's most important strategic commitment.
Recommended by LinkedIn
Third, the listing came with a marquee strategic partner already on the shareholder register. Baker Hughes held a 5 percent stake, locking in the technology relationship that was accelerating the company's integrated drilling capability.
Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and ADNOC Group CEO, captured the moment precisely: ADNOC Drilling, he said, sat at the heart of ADNOC's ambitious growth plans. It was not a peripheral subsidiary , it was the machine that made the growth possible.
The IPO was not simply a fundraising event. It was a declaration. ADNOC Drilling was no longer a government department in corporate clothing. It was a publicly accountable, market-facing energy company, with the discipline, transparency, and ambition that implied.
The IPO accelerated a transformation that had already begun. In the years since listing, ADNOC Drilling has rebuilt itself around three strategic pillars that would have been unrecognizable to the engineers who drilled with AD-1 in 1973: Integrated Drilling Services, Unconventional Resources, and Regional Expansion. Beneath all three runs a fourth thread that is becoming the company's defining characteristic: artificial intelligence.
Integrated Drilling Services and the Turnwell Breakthrough
The shift to IDS - where ADNOC Drilling provides not just a rig and a crew but the entire drilling system, from bit to completion , began with the Baker Hughes partnership in 2018. By 2019, the first IDS well had been completed, at ADCO's Al-Dabbiya field. The results justified the model: faster well delivery, lower unit costs, better performance data.
By 2024, the IDS model had matured to the point where it could be applied to one of the most technically demanding frontier challenges in Abu Dhabi's energy future: unconventional gas.
Abu Dhabi's Ruwais Diyab tight gas concession holds enormous potential, but unlocking it requires a fundamentally different drilling approach , horizontal wells, multi-stage hydraulic fracturing, batch drilling at scale. This is the technology that transformed the United States into the world's largest gas producer. Deploying it in Abu Dhabi required a new vehicle.
ADNOC Drilling announced the creation of the Turnwell joint venture with SLB and Patterson-UTI and the acceleration of its 144 unconventional oil and gas well program, following the successful and efficient delivery of the first wells in the campaign. ADNOC Drilling, through its wholly owned subsidiary, will hold a 55% majority equity stake, SLB a 30% equity stake and Patterson-UTI the remaining 15% equity stake.
Turnwell is executing a $1.7 billion unconventional drilling contract. The early results exceeded expectations. Using cluster drilling , drilling multiple wells from a single pad location , and automation, Turnwell has delivered record-breaking well times. By 2025, ADNOC Drilling was projecting a potential of 300+ unconventional wells annually as the program scales. This is not a pilot. It is the beginning of a new industry vertical for the UAE.
Enersol: Building a Technology Portfolio
The second piece of the reinvention story is Enersol.
Enersol is ADNOC Drilling's joint venture with Alpha Dhabi, and it aims to solidify its position as an AI-centric investment company. The mandate is to invest $1.5 billion in technology-enabled oilfield services companies , not as a passive financial investor, but as an active technology acquirer, bringing those companies' capabilities directly into ADNOC Drilling's operations.
Enersol has announced acquisitions worth around $800 million to acquire majority stakes in four tech-enabled oilfield service companies. One of those acquisitions was Gordon Technologies, a market leader in Measurement While Drilling (MWD) technology. Gordon Technologies' involvement in the Turnwell campaign demonstrates the unique opportunities for Enersol companies to penetrate and grow in the Middle East market, while continuing to strengthen their presence in traditional markets.
The logic is elegant: Enersol buys technology companies. Those technology companies deploy their tools inside Turnwell wells and on ADNOC Drilling rigs. The performance data from those deployments drives further product development. The cycle accelerates. ADNOC Drilling transitions from a customer of technology to an owner of it.
By 2026, Enersol companies were contributing approximately 7 percent of ADNOC Drilling's net income , a share the company expects to grow substantially as the portfolio matures.
The AI Revolution on the Rig Floor
Across the fleet, artificial intelligence is being embedded at an accelerating pace.
With over 30 AI solutions embedded across its operations, ADNOC Drilling is driving smarter, faster and safer performance , from rig to reservoir. These are not cosmetic deployments. They cover predictive maintenance , identifying equipment stress before it causes downtime; real-time drilling optimization , adjusting weight on bit, rotary speed, and flow rate in response to continuous formation data; and autonomous rig movement planning.
In 2025, the company completed drilling activities almost 10 percent ahead of schedule industry-wide, a performance directly attributed to AI and technology deployment. The metric that best captures what this means in practice came in a remarkable 2025 milestone: ADNOC Drilling drilled 5,332 feet in a single 24-hour period , a mile a day, a performance benchmark that would have seemed science fiction to the engineers of the 1980s.
The company is pursuing what it describes as an "AI-native" future , a state in which artificial intelligence is not a supplementary tool but the operating system through which every drilling decision is made, monitored, and optimized.
The AD-300: A Machine That Changes Everything
On 25 June 2026, ADNOC Drilling announced the successful delivery and acceptance of AD-300, the world's first AI-enabled, fully automated Walking Island Rig. Delivered nearly three months ahead of schedule, it marks the first of six next-generation rigs under ADNOC Drilling's US$1.54 billion island drilling programme, enabling earlier revenue generation while accelerating the company's long-term offshore expansion strategy.
Standing approximately 50 metres high, about the height of a 15-storey building, and weighing nearly 2,000 tonnes, AD-300 is designed specifically for ADNOC's artificial island developments offshore Abu Dhabi. However, its significance lies not in its size, but in the technologies it integrates into a single drilling platform.
Unlike conventional offshore rigs that require dismantling, marine transportation and reassembly before relocating to the next well location, AD-300 employs an integrated hydraulic walking system that enables it to move directly between well slots on the artificial islands. By eliminating lengthy relocation procedures, the rig significantly reduces Non-Productive Time (NPT), increases rig utilisation and shortens drilling campaigns. Across large-scale field developments involving hundreds of wells, even modest reductions in relocation time can translate into substantial improvements in productivity and project economics.
Artificial Intelligence is another defining feature of AD-300, although its role extends far beyond automation. Rather than replacing drilling engineers, AI continuously analyses operational data from drilling equipment, mechanical systems and control networks to identify abnormal operating trends, optimise drilling performance and support predictive maintenance. This enables engineering teams to detect potential equipment issues before they develop into operational failures, improving reliability while reducing unplanned downtime.
The rig also incorporates automated pipe handling systems, reducing manual intervention during one of the highest-risk activities in drilling operations. By minimising personnel exposure to suspended loads, rotating equipment and repetitive lifting tasks, automation enhances both operational consistency and workforce safety.
Supporting these capabilities is a hybrid power architecture, allowing AD-300 to optimise onboard power generation while utilising electrical infrastructure where available. The result is improved power management, lower fuel consumption, reduced emissions and greater operational flexibility, aligning with ADNOC's broader objectives of improving efficiency while reducing the environmental footprint of offshore operations.
Equally important is AD-300's integration into ADNOC Drilling's wider digital ecosystem. Real-time operational data can be monitored both offshore and from remote operations centres, allowing engineers to assess equipment health, drilling efficiency and well performance simultaneously across multiple assets. This connected operating model enables faster technical decision-making, improves collaboration between field and onshore engineering teams, and allows lessons learned on one rig to be rapidly applied across the wider fleet.
With AD-301 already entering service and the remaining four next-generation island rigs scheduled for delivery through 2027, ADNOC Drilling is building what will become one of the world's most technologically advanced offshore drilling fleets.
As ADNOC Drilling Chief Executive Officer Abdulla Ateya Al Messabi observed when announcing the milestone:
"The delivery of AD-300 marks a step-change in how we execute large-scale, technology-enabled energy development. By integrating automation, artificial intelligence and robotics at scale, we are enhancing safety, improving efficiency and delivering more consistent, predictable performance."
AD-300 is therefore more than a new drilling rig. It represents the convergence of artificial islands, extended-reach drilling, intelligent automation, predictive analytics and digital engineering into a single operating platform. More importantly, it signals a broader shift across the offshore industry, from mechanically driven drilling operations towards connected, data-driven engineering systems where productivity, reliability and operational intelligence increasingly define competitive advantage.
Regional Expansion: Beyond Abu Dhabi
The fourth dimension of ADNOC Drilling's transformation is geography.
For fifty years, the company operated exclusively within Abu Dhabi. That exclusivity was by design , the mandate was domestic, and the domestic market was enormous. But by the mid-2020s, ADNOC Drilling had developed capabilities, scale, and a balance sheet that could support something more.
In May 2025, ADNOC Drilling signed a deal with SLB to acquire a 70 percent stake in SLB's land rig business in Kuwait and Oman, comprising eight fully operational land rigs , six in Oman and two in Kuwait. The rigs were already under contract with national oil companies PDO (Petroleum Development Oman) and Kuwait Oil Company, ensuring earnings from day one.
In May 2026, ADNOC Drilling completed a $204 million acquisition of an 80% stake in Oman's MB Petroleum Services, adding 22 drilling and workover rigs and operations across Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. The deal brought ADNOC Drilling's total fleet , including international JV rigs , to over 170 units, establishing it among the largest drilling fleets in the MENA region and globally.
The JV increases ADNOC Drilling's regional rig count through its joint ventures to 30 across Oman, Kuwait, and Bahrain. That number will grow. The strategic logic is clear: Kuwait Oil Company is targeting 4 million barrels per day of production capacity. Oman is expanding its rig fleet to 100 units. Saudi Arabia's drilling market remains one of the largest on Earth. For ADNOC Drilling, these are markets where its integrated drilling capability and technology advantage can command premium contracts.
By 2025, the numbers told a story that would have been unimaginable to the engineers who drove AD-1 across the desert in 1973.
In 2025, the company reported revenue of $4.9 billion, which it pointed out was a 22 percent increase year on year, and EBITDA of $2.2 billion, an increase of nine percent year on year. Net profit reached $1.45 billion , the strongest result in the company's history. Since listing in 2021, net profit had more than doubled.
Contract momentum was exceptional: the company secured over $5 billion in new contract awards in 2025, extending revenue visibility through 2040 and reflecting strong customer confidence in ADNOC Drilling's scale, execution quality and ability to deliver complex projects safely and efficiently over the long term.
Technical milestones accompanied the financial records. ADNOC Drilling delivered the world's longest well at 55,000 feet through pioneering extended reach island drilling from ADNOC's innovative offshore artificial islands. This milestone follows a new performance achievement , drilling 5,332ft in 24 hours, a mile-a-day , reflecting a step-change in operational performance.
At the end of Q1 2026, the rig fleet stood at 142 owned rigs, consisting of 95 onshore and 47 offshore, with rig availability remaining strong at 96%. Including JV rigs in regional markets, the total fleet exceeded 170 units.
The dividend picture is equally striking. The company is committed to distributing a minimum of $6.8 billion to shareholders between 2025 and 2030, with a floor annual dividend of $1.05 billion for 2026 and minimum 5 percent annual growth thereafter. For a company that could not have imagined public shareholders in 1972, this is a remarkable statement of confidence.
The energy world of the next twenty years will be defined by two simultaneous pressures that appear contradictory but are in fact complementary: the need for more oil and gas to supply growing global demand, particularly in Asia and Africa, and the urgent requirement to produce that energy with a radically lower emissions footprint.
ADNOC Drilling is positioning itself at the intersection of both.
On the production side, the numbers are unambiguous. ADNOC's target of 5 million barrels per day requires thousands of additional wells over the next decade. The company expects to grow the rig count to at least 148 by the end of 2026, and to 151 by 2028. Beyond that, the unconventional program , with potential to reach 300+ wells annually , represents a structural growth lever that adds an entirely new dimension to the company's forward revenue.
On the technology and efficiency side, the trajectory is equally clear. The AD-300's hybrid power system , with the option to connect to the grid rather than relying entirely on diesel generation , points toward a future where offshore drilling operations produce measurably lower emissions per barrel. AI-driven optimization reduces the number of hours a rig must run to drill a given well. Predictive maintenance reduces the equipment failures that require emergency diesel power for extended recovery operations. Every efficiency gain has an emissions dimension.
The CEO has spoken explicitly of making ADNOC Drilling "AI-native" , a state in which artificial intelligence is not a tool deployed by engineers but the layer of intelligence through which the entire operation thinks. From well planning algorithms that optimize trajectory before a bit touches ground, to autonomous rig positioning systems that adjust drilling parameters in real time, to predictive maintenance models that flag potential failures weeks before they occur , the direction of travel is unmistakable.
The company is building scalable, repeatable unconventional workflows, with the potential of 300+ wells annually. Combining AI-driven well planning, cluster drilling, and autonomous operations, ADNOC Drilling is transforming unconventional from pilot activity into a sustainable growth engine for the UAE and the wider region.
Regionally, the expansion into Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain is only the beginning. The Middle East is entering a multi-decade drilling expansion cycle, driven by NOC production targets and the imperative to maximize hydrocarbon recovery before the energy transition reduces long-term demand. ADNOC Drilling , with its integrated IDS capability, its Enersol technology portfolio, and its growing regional footprint , is positioned to capture a disproportionate share of that market.
The company has also acknowledged, without evasion, the challenge that lies beyond the horizon. As the global energy system gradually decarbonizes , driven by renewable energy economics, electric vehicle penetration, and policy pressure , the long-term demand trajectory for oil and gas will eventually turn. ADNOC Drilling's response to this reality is not denial but pragmatism: be the lowest-cost, most technologically advanced, most efficient drilling operator on Earth, so that when producers must choose which wells to drill, ADNOC Drilling is the obvious answer. The best operator wins in any market.
AD-1 sits outside ADNOC's headquarters on the Abu Dhabi Corniche, preserved as a monument to where this story began. It is a modest machine by any standard , a land drilling rig of the early 1970s, its technology superseded many times over by everything that followed. But it is perhaps the most important artifact in the UAE's industrial history.
In 1973, when that rig turned its first bit into Abu Dhabi's soil under the National Drilling Company's flag, the UAE was two years old. There were fewer than 100 miles of paved road in the country. There was no university. The population of Abu Dhabi was measured in the tens of thousands.
Fifty-three years later, ADNOC Drilling is a company with $4.9 billion in annual revenue, 142 owned rigs, operations in five countries, more than 30 deployed AI solutions, the world's first AI-enabled walking island rig, and a commitment to distribute over a billion dollars annually to its shareholders for the rest of this decade.
But the deeper story is not about money or machines. It is about what happens when a young nation decides that it will not merely sell its natural resources , it will develop the expertise to extract them itself, to master the technology that makes extraction possible, and to use that mastery as the foundation for something that outlasts the oil itself.
For over 50 years, ADNOC Drilling has powered ADNOC's growth and the UAE's energy journey , built by three generations of dedicated talent. Those generations did not just drill wells. They built institutions, trained engineers, developed local expertise where none had existed, and proved to themselves and the world that a state-owned drilling company could be as technically capable, as commercially disciplined, and as strategically sophisticated as any private enterprise on Earth.
The Corniche has changed enormously since that first rig was placed on display. The skyline behind it now carries towers designed by internationally celebrated architects. The shoreline in front of it is where global leaders gather for climate and energy summits. The desert that stretches inland from it contains some of the world's most complex industrial infrastructure.
And somewhere out there , on an artificial island 84 kilometers northwest of this coastline, or on a desert drilling location in the Al Dhafra, or on a rig platform in the Omani interior , an ADNOC Drilling crew is listening to that same symphony of vibration and flow that their predecessors felt beneath their feet in 1973.
The music continues. The orchestra has simply become much, much larger.
From artificial islands to artificial intelligence, every major leap in offshore drilling has begun by challenging what was once considered impossible.
What do you believe will define the next chapter of offshore drilling?
Happy Reading!
