CB&I Completes Petrofac Deal

CB&I just turned a tanks-and-terminals specialist into a much broader energy services company by closing its purchase of Petrofac’s Asset Solutions business on April 9, 2026. The deal adds operations, maintenance, wells, and decommissioning work on both offshore and onshore assets. (tmcnet.com) Before this deal, CB&I was best known for building storage facilities, tanks, and terminals, and it says it has completed more than 60,000 structures over its 135-plus-year history. That made it strong at the construction end of energy infrastructure, but not as broad in the day-to-day running of producing assets after they are built. (cbi.com) Petrofac’s Asset Solutions unit did the opposite kind of work. It handled the crews and contracts that keep aging oil and gas assets running, service wells, and eventually take platforms and facilities apart when they reach the end of their life. (cbi.com) That is why CB&I kept describing the target as a “reimbursable contracting model” business when it announced the purchase on December 24, 2025. In plain English, that means work paid for as services are delivered, which tends to produce steadier cash flow than giant fixed-price engineering jobs that can swing sharply with project cycles. (prnewswire.com) The size of the transfer is not small. Petrofac said around 3,000 employees were expected to move to CB&I when the sale completed, and CB&I said the combined company would operate with two business units: CB&I Asset Solutions in Aberdeen, Scotland, and CB&I Storage Solutions in The Woodlands, Texas. (petrofac.com) (tankstorage.com) The sale also says a lot about Petrofac’s condition. Petrofac told investors in August 2025 that it was in the middle of a restructuring, had suspended debt service payments, and was trying to preserve liquidity even as Asset Solutions won about $500 million in new orders in the first half of 2025. (petrofac.com) To get this sale over the line, Petrofac needed a Company Voluntary Arrangement, which is a United Kingdom insolvency process that lets creditors vote on a settlement plan. Petrofac said on January 14, 2026 that this creditor vote was the final step needed for the Asset Solutions sale to complete. (petrofac.com) That process nearly jammed at the last minute. Rigzone reported on March 13, 2026 that a court upheld the creditor arrangement after a challenge from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, clearing a legal hurdle that had threatened to delay the transaction. (rigzone.com) So the headline is not just that one company bought another business line. CB&I is moving from mostly building energy infrastructure to also running, servicing, and retiring it, while Petrofac is selling a unit that supported about 3,000 jobs as part of a longer restructuring effort. (tmcnet.com) (petrofac.com) CB&I said the new unit brings digital operations and maintenance tools into its offering, which points to the next pitch it will make to customers: one contractor that can build a tank, maintain the surrounding asset for years, manage well-related work, and help shut the site down at the end. In an energy industry trying to cut downtime and squeeze more life out of old infrastructure, that is a much bigger lane than tanks alone. (tmcnet.com)