The world is about to invest more in energy than ever before. At 1FRANKLIN Events, we look at that number and see something else: thousands of new assets that will need protecting for decades.

It is past midnight at a Gulf coast plant, and the air is still warm and heavy with salt. The pipe racks are quiet. The control room is calm. Nobody is looking at the underside of line 14, where a little moisture has been sitting under the insulation since the last rain.

Nobody, that is, except corrosion.

$3.4 trillion.

That is what the world is set to invest in energy this year. A record, about 5% more than last year, and the kind of number that makes every headline.

Bigger grids. More gas. New power plants, new pipelines, new LNG terminals.

We read that number and think about line 14. Because there is one question the headline never asks.

Who is going to protect all of it?

Most of that investment ends up as steel. Steel in the desert sun. Steel in salt spray. Steel under insulation, underground and underwater. And from the day it is commissioned, that steel starts a quiet, slow fight with corrosion.

Why we read the number differently

We are a B2B platform for the people protecting oil and gas assets. Our focus is corrosion and coatings, the discipline that sits between asset integrity and failure. So when we read the year’s biggest energy number, we read it from inside the plant, not from a trading floor.

Here are five things we believe it really means.

01 . Every asset built is an asset to protect

Grid spending alone is heading for around $550 billion. Orders for gas-fired power plants hit a 25-year high of 130 GW in 2025. LNG export terminal spending is set to more than double.

All of that gets built in a few years. All of it then has to be inspected, coated, monitored and maintained for thirty. The building phase gets the ribbon-cutting. The protecting phase decides whether the investment pays off.

02  The real money is in keeping things alive

The number that stopped us.

Read that again. In refining, the pattern repeats: about half of this year’s spend goes to maintaining plants that already exist. A huge share of the industry’s money is spent keeping wells, pipelines, platforms and plants safe for one more year, then another.

That is why we believe integrity isn’t a support function. It is the business.

03  The costliest corrosion decisions happen in budget meetings

Every integrity engineer knows this, but rarely gets to say it in the room where it counts: most of an asset’s corrosion story is written before the first weld.

The coating system. The surface preparation standard. The choice of materials. The cathodic protection design. Whether an inspector will physically be able to reach a weld in ten years’ time. All of it is settled at design and procurement, usually by people who will never operate the asset.

Now look at the conditions those decisions are being made in this year. Equipment is more expensive. Around 30% of LNG projects under construction are already over budget. Schedules are tight and contractors are stretched.

That is exactly when protection quietly becomes a line item to trim. A three-coat system becomes two. Surface preparation gets rushed to hold a milestone. Inspection access is “value-engineered” out of the layout. Every one of those savings looks sensible on the day it is signed.

The bill arrives years later, and it lands on someone else: the operations team that inherits the asset long after the project team has moved on.

So the question we would put to any asset owner this year isn’t how much you are investing. It is this: who on your project has the authority to say no when protection is the thing being cut?

• Analyze data faster with AI-powered insights.

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Today’s saving on a coating specification is tomorrow’s shutdown. It just arrives on someone else’s watch.

04  Our region feels it first

In the Gulf, the stakes are higher. Heat, humidity and salt are hard on steel. And the Middle East, together with the United States, now dominates orders for new gas-fired power, while the region’s national energy companies continue to commit tens of billions of dollars to new projects.

At the same time, more than 30 energy facilities in the region have been reported damaged this year, and teams are working to assess, repair and restart them safely. New build and repair, happening together, competing for the same corrosion engineers, coating inspectors and integrity specialists. That is a lot of responsibility resting on a small number of experienced people.

05  The answer is usually one conversation away

Every inspection is a conversation between what was specified and what actually happened.

Put a corrosion engineer, a coatings applicator, an inspection manager and an asset owner in front of the same pipe, and you will hear four different stories about why it is failing. Each of them is partly right. Only together do they add up to the full picture, and to a fix that lasts.

Too often, those four people sit in different departments, different companies and different events. That is the gap 1Franklin Events was built to close. No generic crowds. No wasted conversations. Just the right people in the right room.

Build. Connect. Succeed.

That is why we created Corrosphere. In April 2027, Corrosphere brings together the people who specify, apply, inspect and own protective systems across oil and gas and maritime, around one shared question: how do we make critical assets last longer?

Protecting assets. Advancing knowledge. Connecting industry.

BUILT TODAY. PROTECTED FOR DECADES.

The world has decided to build. $3.4 trillion of it, this year alone. Now the people who protect it need a room. That is what we are here for.

OVER TO YOU

What is the one integrity challenge on your desk right now that you wish more people were talking about?

Tell us. It shapes the conversations we build next. Share it through the contact page at 1franklinevents.com or on our LinkedIn page.

Sources: IEA (2026), World Energy Investment 2026, iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2026, licence CC BY 4.0, and IEA (2025), The Implications of Oil and Gas Field Decline Rates. Figures adapted by 1FRANKLIN Events; 2026 figures are IEA estimates. Opinions are our own; 1FRANKLIN Events is not affiliated with or endorsed by the IEA.