The Middle East’s ambitions cannot afford blind spots between projects and plants

For decades, asset-intensive organisations have managed their businesses through two distinct lenses: CAPEX and OPEX. One funds the future: new plants, infrastructure, and expansion. The other sustains the present: operations, maintenance, and ongoing performance.

Beyond the separate budget lines, they are genuinely separate worlds within organisations: separate teams with different skills, tools, and incentive structures, following separate financial treatments and accounting logics.

This model became standard practice because it matched the industrial era it served: large capital projects built once, handed over cleanly, and then run steadily for decades. However, as GCC Vision programmes place unprecedented pressure on capital projects to convert investment into durable industrial capacity, it is important to understand its weaknesses, the blind spots it can create and the need to adapt the model to the region’s new industrial age.

Delivering plants that deliver value

The problems caused by the divide between projects and assets in asset-intensive industries have been evident and documented for some time. In fact, leading actors in the region, such as national oil companies, have challenged that model in the past decade, through stronger integration mandates, shared platforms, and digital twins that connect projects to assets. 

Here are the three main places the classic model breaks:

First, the divide rewards project delivery over value, leading to facilities failing to achieve the expected return on investment even a decade after commissioning. The average upstream oil and gas project fails to return as much as 40% of its value estimated at sanction, according to research by the Independent Project Analysis (IPA).  A similar gap has been found in other key industries for GCC ambitions, such as metals and mining.

Second, the delivery-led model reduces handover to a compliance exercise. Success is measured by whether large volumes of information have been transferred, usually through PDFs, emails, document registers, and close-out packages. That may satisfy a contractual requirement, but it does not necessarily prepare an operating team to run, maintain, and improve the asset. 

Recent research by consultancy Hatch on project ramp-up performance identifies a consistent pattern among projects that do achieve their expected value: strong attention to the quality of information handed over, not just the quantity; integrated teams that include operations staff during construction, not just at handover; and technology used to create genuine understanding of how the plant works; not just a document repository. 

What does that look like in practice? What we see more and more in successful projects across the Middle East is a common digital backbone connecting design, construction, and operations. It is often built around a digital twin platform implemented during construction, with an EAM platform ensuring that maintenance plans are live and accurate from day one of operations. The thread of intelligence that runs from engineering model to operational asset is what separates successful ramp-ups from those that struggle for years.

STOs: the risk of blind spots and siloed tools

Third, the divide is most damaging when capital projects happen inside an existing plant: not to build something new, but to transform something already running.

The standard model assumes a clean sequence: design, build, commission, operate. However, modern plants evolve continuously through upgrades, retrofits, and compliance modifications while remaining in operation.

Across the GCC this decade, major refineries and petrochemical facilities have undertaken precisely such transformations: shifting toward higher-value product slates, integrating new process units, meeting cleaner fuel standards, or otherwise altering the asset mid-life, long after the original handover occurred.

Even without transformation, the challenges caused by fragmented data and disconnected teams across the project/assets fault line are already visible during Shutdown, Turnaround, and Outage (STO) events that see maintenance work and modernisation happen side by side.

Without end-to-end supervision and a common platform such as an Enterprise Project Performance tool to coordinate work, these moments are prone to miscoordination between teams and scope creep, with predictable results: according to BCG, two-thirds of STOs fail to achieve their objectives, incurring high direct costs and significantly impacting long-term value.

Why this matters more in the Middle East, and why it matters now

This challenge exists across asset-intensive industries globally. But two converging forces make it particularly consequential for the Middle East today.

First, the scale of investment is unprecedented. Energy investment in the Middle East reached approximately $175 billion in 2024. Infrastructure construction is forecast to grow from $204 billion in 2025 to $267 billion by 2030. At that scale of investment, the value that can be created by better transitions from project to plant cannot be overstated.

Second, the reconstruction context creates a categorically different risk environment. Across the region, dozens of major industrial facilities, including refineries, petrochemical complexes, power generation assets, and water infrastructure, have sustained damage requiring reconstruction.

What makes this categorically different from a standard capital project is that reconstruction does not happen in a clean, sequential environment. It happens in parallel with ongoing operations: project teams and operations teams must work side by side on the same physical asset, often sharing the same infrastructure, the same utilities, and the same safety perimeter.

The CAPEX-OPEX divide, already a structural inefficiency in normal conditions, becomes an acute operational risk when the two worlds are literally co-located and interdependent.

The triple continuity resilient organisations need

The disconnect between CAPEX and OPEX is ultimately a problem of continuity: of knowledge, data, and people. Closing it requires different capabilities and accountabilities than the ones that created it.

First, organisations need the ability to carry engineering intent forward across the lifecycle, so that what was designed and built remains accessible to those who must operate and maintain it. Successful operators will connect fragmented data across design, construction and operations into a unified foundation - not as a one-time integration exercise, but as an ongoing discipline.

With that foundation in place, operators gain capabilities that matter in a more volatile environment. They can anticipate risk with fewer blind spots, assess the impact of change, reconfigure operations, and optimise performance with greater confidence than those who treat projects and assets as separate worlds.

Just as importantly, continuity of data and process supports continuity of accountability. Rather than one team being accountable for project delivery, another for asset performance and value falling in between, organisations can create a shared basis for value across the lifecycle.

That is precisely what the region needs to deliver on its ambitions for economic leadership, diversification, and infrastructure fit for the future. GCC countries are doing this in a period that does not tolerate inefficient practices and value that takes a decade to materialise. That means reducing the blind spots and silos of the past, and the CAPEX/OPEX divide is among the most consequential.