ACCIONA and its partner SEPCOIII announced that they will build the Jubail 3B desalination plant with a capacity of 570,000 cubic meters per day, which will serve 2 million people in Riyadh and Qasim. SEPCOII and itself are the main EPC contractors of the project, which is developed and funded by a consortium composed of ENGIE, NESMA and AJLAN for the publicly-owned Saudi Water Cooperation Company. SWPC has announced the financial end of the project, estimated at US$692 million. The plant is scheduled to be put into use in the first quarter of 2024 and will be handed over under a 25-year BOO (build-own-operate) agreement.

Jubail 3B desalination plant project

The plant will be located in Jubail, an industrial city on the coast of the Arabian Gulf in eastern Saudi Arabia, about 100 kilometers from Dammam. ACCIONA previously built the JubailRO4 desalination plant (capacity 100,000 cubic meters/day) at the same location. It will undertake the construction of the entire reverse osmosis system, including civil engineering and raw water pumping. The project will include storage tanks for daily production, and solar power plants to reduce grid power consumption. To this end, the Spanish company will also build a photovoltaic solar power plant. The EPC contract will also include the construction of a 58-kilometer transmission line, a substation and related maritime engineering.

Through this contract, ACCIONA will consolidate itself as one of the major water treatment infrastructure companies in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, in one of the most stressed regions on the earth. After the Jubail 3 project is completed, ACCIONA will use reverse osmosis technology to supply approximately 2.37 million cubic meters of desalinated water every day, consolidating it into the most efficient, sustainable, and smallest carbon footprint desalination technology. Saudi Arabia’s State-owned Salt Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) awarded ACCIONA and its partner RTCC a contract to design and build the Shuqaiq1 desalination plant for US$384 million. The plant has a daily processing capacity of 400,000 cubic meters, which will help improve the supply of drinking water, make up for the water shortage of residents in southwestern Saudi Arabia, and provide a new source of drinking water for household, urban, agricultural and industrial use. In 2020, a 25-year contract worth US$594.4 million was signed for the design, construction, operation and maintenance of the Shuqaiq3 desalination plant in the same area. It is currently under construction and is expected to be put into use sometime this year, with a processing capacity of 450,000 cubic meters per day and serving 2 million people. It will also have a photovoltaic power station to reduce specific energy consumption. Keywords: engineering construction, engineering news

ACCIONA also won a US$515.8 million turnkey contract for the AlKhobarRO2 plant in Khobar, on the east coast of the country, about 400 kilometers from the capital Riyadh. The capacity of the facility will exceed 630,000 cubic meters per day, making it one of the largest reverse osmosis plants in the country and the largest single-phase EPC reverse osmosis plant in the world. In July 2018, the company also won a contract of approximately US$224.2 million for the construction and start-up of the AlKhobar RO1 seawater desalination plant with a capacity of 210,000 cubic meters per day. It is located near AlKhobarRO2 and will serve 1 million people. It also designed and built the aforementioned AlJubailRO4 desalination plant for Marafiq. It has a daily processing capacity of 100,000 cubic meters and serves the city and the industrial parks near the eastern part of the country.Editor/XingWentao