April 28, 2026 [The Financial Times]- Abu Dhabi National Oil Company is planning to invest tens of billions of dollars to build a natural gas business in the US, as it accelerates efforts to diversify as the Iran war disrupts the energy industry.

Nameer Siddiqui, the new chief investment officer of the group’s overseas investment arm XRG, said the company was assessing 29 potential deals to help create a vertically integrated global gas business.

“Our objective is to diversify our commodity exposure and the XRG business is going to be across the entire gas value chain,” he told the FT in his first newspaper interview since his appointment in January.

This could include everything from “getting gas out of the ground, owning the pipes and the processing plants and all the way to liquefaction facilities to put gas on water and potentially even owning the re-gas facilities and pipelines to end users in destination countries”.

Siddiqui said the company was evaluating controlled transactions, drilling joint ventures and minority stakes as part of its plan to create a business that would serve booming global demand for liquefied natural gas as well as feed the US need for gas to power data centres.

Asked whether XRG had sufficient money given the financial challenges posed by the Iran war, Siddiqui cited the company’s “commitment to deploy tens of billions of dollars into the US energy value chain. This is unwavering, although obviously we will only do that under the right return expectations. The US is a market where we want to be bold.”

While other companies have tried and failed to build fully integrated gas projects in the US, Siddiqui noted that XRG benefited from having a single shareholder with the resources and long-term outlook to make such investments.

Martin Houston, an industry veteran and chair of Australian explorer Omega Oil and Gas, said: “XRG has the ambition, financial capacity and wherewithal to go after big targets and you shouldn’t underestimate them in their drive to create a vertically integrated gas business.” However, he cautioned that such a project would be complex and take years.

XRG already has a foothold in the US through a stake in the Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas.

Middle Eastern investors with their own capital have an advantage as banks shy away from the US LNG market fearing a global oversupply, according to Alex Munton, director of global gas at Rapidan Energy Group.

But XRG has missed the enormous waves of construction in the industry that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

“You’ve got several dominant players in the US LNG market and they want to expand,” Munton said. “XRG will have to work out how it fits into this already-established market.”

Launched just over a year ago, XRG has bought assets in Egypt, Mozambique and Azerbaijan but has struggled to finalise bigger deals, and in September withdrew a $19bn bid for Australian oil and gas group Santos.

Siddiqui declined to comment on press reports saying XRG was looking to buy into Australia’s North West Shelf project, but said the company was clearly interested in the country’s LNG investments.

XRG’s biggest investments have been in chemicals deals it inherited from parent company Adnoc — including the merger of assets it owned with Austria’s OMV that created Borouge International and the takeover of Germany’s Covestro.

The €14.7bn Covestro deal drew criticism for its high valuation and timing given weak chemicals demand and high energy prices in Europe.

Michele Fiorentino, president of XRG’s energy solutions division, said it was too early to judge the performance of the acquisition but that “when it comes to the underlying capabilities that the company has, we have no doubts”.

While Fiorentino’s division was originally termed “Low Carbon Energies”, with the aim of investing in technologies including hydrogen and carbon capture, Fiorentino said XRG was no longer looking to invest in these areas as there was insufficient demand and they did not make money.

XRG bought into ExxonMobil’s low-carbon hydrogen project in Texas but plans to proceed have been put on hold indefinitely.

Instead, XRG will exclusively focus on investing in projects that produce, transport or use natural gas, said Fiorentino.