Veolia awarded huge desalination contract in Saudi Arabia

France's Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies (Paris: VIE) has been chosen to design and build one of the world’s largest desalination plants in Saudi Arabia.

Considered of "national importance," according to Veolia, the plant is to provide 800,000m3/day of desalinated water to Jubail Industrial City and the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia—a desert region facing massive industrialization and a growing population.

The contract is worth approximately €702 million Euros. It is part of a long-term expansion Independent Water and Power Production Project (IWPP) plan for power and desalination capacities in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, and involves the supply not only of desalinated water but also the production of 2,750 MW of electricity.

The overall IWPP Project was won by a Consortium of developers composed of Suez Energy International in partnership with ACWA Power and Gulf Investment Corporation, which placed an Engineering Procurement and Construction (EPC) contract to a consortium for the new Power and Desalination Plant.

The members of the consortium include General Electric (USA), Hyundai Heavy Industries (Korea) and SIDEM (France).

Veolia's thermal desalination units will recuperate the heat from the power station to be built by General Electric. Hyundai will assure the construction of the seawater intake and outlet units.

The desalination plant will be based on SIDEM’s Multiple Effect Distillation (MED) process, and will include 27 desalination units, each having a capacity of 29,630 m3/day, and a remineralization plant. The MED process is one of the leading technologies incorporated within the project. Electrical consumption is expected to be one third of that of competing processes.

The project is to be completed by 2010.

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