South Korea’s Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction has been awarded a $422 million engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract to build the Jeddah 4 desalination plant in Saudi Arabia.

The contract for building the nation’s largest seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) plant in Shuaibah, 110 km south of Jeddah, on the coast of Red Sea, was awarded by Saudi Arabia’s Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC).

Doosan saw off competition from the consortium of the local Hydrochem and Saudi Services for Electromechanical (SSEM) to win the EPC contract.

The Jeddah 4 plant will have a capacity to desalinate 400,000 cubic metres a day (cmpd) of water, and will be located at Shuaibah, about 110 kilometres south
of Jeddah. SWCC had invited consultants to submit proposals for two major desalination projects at Yanbu and Shuqaiq.The projects are two of eight planned independent water projects (IWPs) or independent water & power projects (IWPPs) planned to be developed in the kingdom up to 2025.

SWCC estimates it will need to boost its desalination capacity by 2.2 million cmpd by 2020 to meet the rapidly growing demand. Following the award of the Jeddah 4 contract, the water client is planning to move ahead with all future major water and cogeneration water and power plants under the IWP and IWPP models.

With the latest deal, Korean group has re-entered the Saudi Arabian seawater desalination market after five long years, stated the report. The company had last worked on the desalination plant project at Ras Al Khair in 2010 and Yanbu seawater desalination plant Phase Three deal in 2012, it added.