Home-AMA: Energy 2026: How Addept3D Sees the Gap Between AM Value and Industrial Adoption in Energy
What does additive manufacturing mean for the future of energy? 3D Printing Industry investigates ahead ofAMA: Energy 2026on April 30th. Additive manufacturing has made real inroads in the energy sector, but its most complex, high-value components are still waiting their turn.
Tarun Chand, Technical Sales Specialist at Singapore-based 3D printing and precision manufacturing firmAddept3D(a sister entity of UK-basedWAAM3D) has spent seven years working with OEMs, end users and everyone in between, navigating the internal politics, technical hurdles and entrenched risk aversion that separate a promising AM concept from a signed-off production project.
When Chand presented at our AMA:Energy 2025, he turned that experience into a practical argument for why the energy industry needs to stop thinking small, and what it will realistically take to get there.
The 2026 edition of ourAMA: Energy online conferencereturns this month. Register now!
Chand noted that Norwegian energy giantEquinorleveraged over NOK 1 billion, roughly $100 million, in savings by growing its additive program. An undisclosed company he previously worked with saved over $1 million simply by printing parts instead of sourcing them through traditional channels. And yet the industry’s ambition has not kept pace with those returns.
Most of the activity in metal AM has clustered around PBF components sitting within a 250 to 300mm build volume, while the large, complex components that define so much of oil and gas infrastructure remain largely untouched. “We do see a lot of them in the POC stage,” he said, “but none of them have yet moved [into a] production environment.”
That gap between proof of concept and production is, in large part, a cost story. The machines capable of printing large components, using DED technologies such as laser DED, wire DED or WAAM, despite being cheaper than their comparatively sized PBF one are still expensive to build, buy and run.
“Budgets aren’t that easy to come by,” the Specialist said. “It wasn’t easy then and it’s even worse now. And a lot of people don’t want to drive and put their names on something that could fail.”
This reluctance is not irrational, and it is reflected by the approval process. Large, critical components carry serious consequences when they go wrong, and upper management is acutely aware of it. Sign-offs stretch well beyond the one or two a standard project might require, with questions of robustness, reliability and track record raised at every level.
Source: 3D Printing Industry
