Acciona Agua signs $234m contract to build desalination plant for SWCC
Facility is expected to be completed within two years and will be one of the largest desalination facilities in Saudi Arabia
Acciona Agua, a Spanish company that provides sustainable solutions for infrastructure and renewable energy projects, has said that it has been awarded a $234 million contract by the Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC), a Saudi government corporation, to build a desalination plant in the Al Khobar region of the kingdom.
According to a statement from the group, the facility is expected to be completed within two years and it will have a capacity of 210,000 cubic metres per day. This will make it one of the largest desalination facilities in Saudi Arabia, it added.
The plant will also supply water to Aramco, the world’s largest oil company.
In 2012, Acciona Agua was awarded a contract to design, build and commission the Al Jubail RO4 seawater desalination plant for Marafiq, along with SGB-PCMC, which serves both the city and the industrial complex in the Eastern Province of the country, on the Arabian Sea coast.
The engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for the Al Khobar plant, plus a one-year warranty, is SWCC’s first design-and-build project with a Spanish company.
“I think we were selected as the most favourable contractor by SWCC because of the highly efficient design, which enabled us to offer not only a very competitive price for EPC but to optimise the Opex and the specific power consumption, not to mention our proven track record worldwide and in the GCC,” Julio de la Rosa, head of business development for Acciona Agua in the Middle East, said.
He added that the project will be the company’s sixth seawater reverse osmosis desalination plant in the Gulf region.
“It is a great honour to work for the SWCC. This remarkable project for Acciona Agua in the Gulf is a strategic milestone for our company. It shows our technical capabilities as well as our competitive cost structure,” concluded Jesús Sancho, managing director for the Middle East at Acciona Agua.
