South Korea’s leading heavy industrial company, Doosan Enerbility has won the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contract for Shuaibah 3 Independent Water Project (IWPP) in Saudi Arabia.
The company signed the EPC contract with Shuaibah Three Water Desalination Company, a special purpose vehicle of ACWA Power.
Under the EPC contract, Doosan Enerbility will build a desalination plant capable of producing 600,000 cubic meter of water per day and a 60 MW solar power plant.
The project work is expected to start in September 2022 and completion is scheduled for May 2025. Once completed, the desalination plant will supply potable water to 2 million people. The solar farm will provide electric power to the desalination plant.
Acwa Power said in a statement that the switch from thermal to reverse osmosis (RO) will reduce the power needed to desalinate seawater by 70 percent.
The company noted that “the agreement entailed the conversion and replacement of the Independent Water and Power Project (IWPP) from an energy-intensive power generation and thermal desalination facility to a greenfield seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) desalination plant under the name “Shuaibah 3 Independent Water Project (IWP)”.”
“As such, operations of Shuaibah 3 Independent Water and Power Project will cease in 2025, saving nearly 45 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions and 22 million barrels of light crude oil annually,” according to the statement.
The Shuaibah 3 IWP aims to establish the world’s largest reverse osmosis desalination facility in Shuaibah, located 110 km south of Jeddah.
