Workers in coveralls and hard hats gathered round as a masked labourer ran machinery to take the ceremonial cutting of first steel at the company's yard in Altamira.

"The Abkatun project is our most important project for many reasons," Scott Munro, McDermott's vice president for the Americas, Europe and Africa, told the crowd.

"It's our largest project, it's the project in which we will do the most work in Mexico, for Mexico."

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