Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction has won an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for the Yanbu 4 seawater desalination plant in Saudi Arabia.  

Doosan announced on January 25 that it had signed the 780 billion won (US$708 million) EPC contract with the sponsor consortium comprising of French energy company Engie and Saudi Arabian company Mowah.

Korea Eximbank has backed Doosan by providing project financing amounting to 260 billion won. This is the first time that Korea Eximbank has ever provided financial support for a seawater reverse-osmosis (RO) desalination project, and the bank has plans to expand financing for projects in this sector.

Yanbu 4 is being built in Ar Rayyis, about 260 kilometres north of Jeddah, on the Red Sea coast. The RO process is a water purification process that removes salt from seawater by using pressure to force water molecules through a semi-permeable membrane.

The plant will supply 450,000 tonnes of potable water daily, enough for 1.5 million people in the Ar Rayyis region in the western part of Saudi Arabia. Doosan plans to complete construction by 2023.

The independent water producer (IWP) project was awarded to the Engie-Mowah consortium, which signed an offtake agreement with the Saudi Water Partnership Company (SWPC) in February 2020. The project company will sell the entire capacity and output to SWPC under a water purchase agreement (WPA) for 25 years.

"This order shows that Doosan’s technology has once again received recognition in the Middle East, where we expect to see more seawater RO desalination plants constructed,” says Inwon Park, chief executive officer of Doosan Heavy’s Plant EPC Group. “We plan to penetrate the Middle East’s seawater RO desalination market, as it is forecast to reach a value of US$2.8 billion by 2025.”

Doosan previously won EPC contracts for the Doha Phase 1 project in Kuwait in 2016, Shoaiba project in Saudi Arabia in 2017, and Sharqiyah desalination project in Oman in 2018.