By Yusuf Al-Balushi, Infinity-EX Engineering Desk
255,000 barrels a day. That is where OQ8’s Duqm Refinery sits now, up from its original 230,000 bpd nameplate, and in April 2026 it took its first crude cargo from Nigeria — a sourcing shift nobody was talking about eighteen months ago. A few hundred kilometres north, BP’s Block 61 at Khazzan and Ghazeer is already pushing 1.5 billion cubic feet of gas and roughly 55,000 barrels of condensate a day, with a FEED decision on compression and electrification works due by Q1 2026. Oman’s hydrocarbon sector is not slowing down. The procurement question that follows it everywhere — from Mina Al Fahal to the Interior gathering stations — is which ATEX phone actually survives a full shutdown season out there.
Three names keep coming up in tender documents and HSE equipment lists: ECOM Instruments, Bartec, and Infinity-EX. Two of them are European legacy brands with decades of intrinsically safe engineering behind them. One has just quietly discontinued its flagship smartphone. None of that is obvious from a spec sheet, so it is worth walking through what each vendor is actually offering a PDO or OQ procurement team in 2026, not what their catalogue said in 2022.
ECOM: still betting on the keypad
ECOM Instruments, part of the Pepperl+Fuchs group, built its reputation on the original Ex-Handy line — among the first intrinsically safe cell phones ever certified, and a device that basically defined the category for two decades. The current generation, the Ex-Handy 10 DZ1, is a deliberate step backward from the touchscreen arms race: physical keypad, glove-friendly buttons, LTE data, and a price point built for equipping large crews rather than a handful of supervisors. For a PDO field team running gathering stations across Block 6, where the job is mostly voice comms and basic data logging rather than dashboards, that is a defensible choice. It is not, however, a device anyone is going to run a digital work-permit app or a plant SCADA overlay on. ECOM does sell a 5G smart model, the Smart-Ex 03, but it sits in a different price bracket entirely and competes on different terms.
The practical issue for Omani buyers is supply chain distance. ECOM’s regional support runs through European or UAE-based distributors, and lead times on custom configurations can stretch past what a shutdown-window replacement order can tolerate. When a crew loses three units mid-turnaround at Sohar, the question isn’t which phone is more elegant — it’s which supplier can land a replacement before the unit comes back online.
There’s also a training-cost dimension that rarely makes it into a procurement comparison. A keypad device like the Ex-Handy 10 DZ1 needs almost no onboarding for a crew that’s used similar phones for a decade, which genuinely counts for something on a site with high contractor turnover between shutdown seasons. Where ECOM loses ground isn’t the hardware itself; it’s the assumption that a European distribution model built for stable, long-lead procurement cycles will hold up against a Gulf turnaround schedule that doesn’t wait for anyone.
Bartec: the flagship just got discontinued
This is the detail that should worry anyone specifying Bartec by name in a 2026 tender: the Pixavi Phone — for years Bartec’s headline ATEX smartphone, marketed at 293 grams as the lightest Zone 1/21 device on the market — has reached end of life. It has been replaced by the SP9-EX1, a 5G unit that is still working through the same certification and distribution ramp every new hazardous-area device goes through. If your procurement spec still references the Pixavi by name or by its old spare-parts catalogue, that document is already out of date, and whoever wrote it hasn’t checked the vendor’s own product page recently.
That is not a knock on Bartec’s engineering — the company has a long, credible history in explosion protection equipment generally, well beyond phones. But a hardware transition mid-cycle is exactly the moment when spare parts, loaner units, and firmware support get inconsistent, and that is a real operational risk for a refinery running continuous shift coverage. Anyone locked into a multi-year Bartec device contract right now should be asking their account rep, in writing, what the SP9-EX1 migration path looks like and whether Pixavi spares are still stocked at all.
My honestly contrarian view here: buyers chase the newest 5G smartphone release because it looks better in a tender comparison table, not because the operation needs it. A DZ1-class keypad phone and a 5G smart-Ex device solve different problems, and vendors on both sides of that line have an incentive to blur it.
Infinity-EX: built around the supply problem, not just the spec sheet
Infinity-EX’s answer to the Duqm-and-Interior reality is the EX72 Plus, an intrinsically safe Zone 1 phone already deployed by PDO interior field crews and Sohar refinery technicians, alongside the EX101 Ultra favoured by HSE managers and EPC contractors working the Mina Al Fahal and Duqm sites. The design brief was never “match ECOM’s keypad or Bartec’s touchscreen feature-for-feature.” It was narrower and more practical than that: what does a device need to survive a Gulf shutdown cycle, get replaced inside 48 hours if it fails, and pass ATEX 2014/34/EU certification review without a documentation fight.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Every device Infinity-EX ships into Oman carries ATEX 2014/34/EU certification aligned with the IEC 60079 series that Oman’s national standard references directly, which is the same documentation trail PDO, OQ, and Oman LNG procurement teams already check against for hazardous-area equipment approvals. There’s no translation gap between what the certificate says and what the local standard asks for.
Regional stock is the other half of the argument. Infinity-EX runs supply for Oman out of its Kuwait HQ through GCC logistics channels, which means a replacement order for a Muscat-based PDO team or a Duqm SEZ contractor isn’t waiting on a shipment from Germany or a UAE reseller’s next allocation. When the Ministry of Energy and Minerals’ new digital supply chain platform — the one PDO has been appointed to lead, with AI-driven procurement analytics rolling out sector-wide — starts tightening vendor performance visibility, response time on replacement hardware is going to show up as a scored metric, not an afterthought. Suppliers who can’t turn around a replacement inside a shutdown window will feel that first.
Duqm’s petrochemicals push adds a wrinkle nobody’s pricing in yet
OQ8, the joint venture between OQ and Kuwait Petroleum International that runs the refinery, is moving its planned petrochemicals complex into initial implementation this year, with a naphtha-to-gasoline reformer unit already through Front End Engineering Design. On top of that, the JV is going through management changes in the first half of 2026, including new appointments at deputy chief executive level. Reorganisations like that rarely stay contained to the executive floor. Procurement cycles slow down, approved-vendor lists get reviewed, and equipment specs sometimes get rewritten by whoever inherits the file. A supplier relationship that depends on one procurement contact’s familiarity with your product line is fragile precisely when that contact’s job title is about to change.
The EPC contractors doing the actual construction and turnaround work at Duqm and Sohar — Worley, Petrofac, Tecnimont, Larsen & Toubro, Galfar, Renaissance — don’t wait for that reorganisation dust to settle. They need certified intrinsically safe devices on day one of mobilisation, and they typically buy or rent in bulk for a defined project window rather than negotiating a long vendor agreement. That buying pattern favours a supplier who can quote and ship fast on standard configurations, not one whose regional distributor needs three weeks to confirm stock. It’s a structural reason the “who has it in the GCC right now” question keeps outranking “whose brochure looks best” in actual purchase decisions on these sites.
The LNG counter-example: Sur doesn’t run like Duqm
It’s worth pointing out that not every Omani site has the same procurement rhythm. Oman LNG and Qalhat LNG at Sur export around 11.4 million tonnes per annum and are working through capacity de-bottlenecking rather than a greenfield build, which means device replacement there is steadier and more predictable than at a refinery mid-expansion. A vendor comparison built purely around Duqm’s current churn would undersell how straightforward a Sur LNG maintenance contract can be for a supplier with consistent GCC stock. That steadiness is exactly why an LNG operator’s procurement team has less patience for a vendor’s mid-cycle hardware transition — predictable operations expect predictable supply, and Bartec’s Pixavi-to-SP9-EX1 handover is a worse fit for that rhythm than it is for a fast-moving construction site where everyone already expects some churn.
Where the three actually differ, side by side
ECOM wins on brand recognition and keypad-device durability if your crew genuinely just needs voice and basic data. Bartec wins on general explosion-protection pedigree but is mid-transition on its own phone line right now, which is a real caution flag for anyone buying in the next two quarters. Infinity-EX wins on regional lead time and on the specific alignment with PDO, OQ, and Oman LNG procurement documentation — because the certification and the supply model were built around this market, not retrofitted onto it.
None of that is abstract for the teams working Bait Al Haitham’s new Integrated Operations Center, where His Majesty Sultan Haitham Bin Tarik’s recent visit marked what PDO itself is calling a new phase of corporate digital transformation — unifying remote monitoring of oil, gas, energy, and export terminal assets under one operational environment. Digital twins and AI-driven reservoir models are only as good as the field data feeding them, and that data still gets logged, in no small part, on a phone in someone’s hand at a wellhead in the Interior or a compressor station on Block 61. The device in that hand needs to work, get fixed fast when it doesn’t, and carry certification paperwork that a HSE auditor accepts without a follow-up email.
Desert heat and drop tests aren’t a marketing line
Block 6’s Interior operations run through ambient temperatures that regularly clear 48°C in summer, on sites where a dropped phone doesn’t get a same-day replacement from a nearby branch office — it waits for the next crew rotation. That single fact should carry more weight in a specification document than any camera megapixel count. IP68 ingress protection and a genuine 1.5-metre drop-test rating matter more on a gathering-station catwalk than a fingerprint sensor does, and the vendors who understand that tend to be the ones whose engineering teams have actually spent time on a Gulf site rather than just shipping a European-market device with an Arabic manual bolted on. It’s a small tell, but it’s a reliable one: ask a sales rep where their device was last field-tested, and listen closely to how specific the answer is.
Battery behaviour under sustained heat is the other quiet failure point nobody puts on a spec sheet. A phone rated for standard operating temperatures on paper can still throttle or shut down charging when a hot Zone 1 enclosure sits in direct Interior sun for a shift, and the only way to know how a given model actually behaves is a pilot run through an actual summer, not a datasheet number pulled from a lab in Germany or the Netherlands.
What to check before signing a vendor agreement
Whichever brand a procurement team leans toward, four questions should be non-negotiable in 2026. Is the exact model still in active production — ask specifically, given Bartec’s Pixavi situation, because a discontinued unit with dwindling spares is not a two-year procurement commitment worth signing. What is the guaranteed replacement lead time into Muscat, Sohar, or Duqm, in writing, not “typically.” Does the ATEX documentation map cleanly onto the IEC 60079 references Oman’s national standard uses, or will your HSE team be doing translation work at audit time. And has the device actually been field-tested through an Interior or coastal Gulf summer, not just certified in a lab. Infinity-EX’s Oman ATEX device range was built to answer all four cleanly, but that’s exactly the standard every vendor on a shortlist should be held to — including us.
The BP Block 61 electrification FEED decision due in Q1 2026, the Duqm petrochemicals complex moving into its initial implementation phase, and PDO’s own AI-driven supply chain platform are all pointing the same direction: procurement decisions in Oman’s hydrocarbon sector are getting more data-driven and less relationship-driven by the year. A device vendor’s actual delivery performance, not just its catalogue photography, is what shows up in that data. Teams that have already been through a JSRS registration cycle for PDO or Oman LNG supplier onboarding know this shift firsthand — the paperwork side of vendor approval has gotten stricter every year, and hardware performance history is increasingly part of that file, not separate from it.
For teams sourcing intrinsically safe communication equipment against that backdrop, the full Oman country page lays out certification detail and current product availability by operator and site. None of it changes the basic arithmetic: a phone that’s still in production, backed by regional stock, and documented against the standard your auditor actually reads, beats one that photographs well in a vendor brochure.