South Korea's Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction Co Ltd said on Wednesday it has won a $1.46 billion contract to build a new desalination plant in Saudi Arabia. The plant will produce 1.025 million cubic meters of desalinated water per day and will be integrated with a 2,400 megawatts (MW) power plant, in Ras Azzour, on the Gulf coast. The plant, expected to be the world's largest would be completed in January 2014, Doosan said in a statement on the Korea Stock Exchange. State-owned Saline Water Conversion Corp (SWCC) has notified the company of winning the deal, Doosan added. Doosan had submitted the third lowest offer in the bidding process which closed on May 8. The contract was lower than its $1.937 billion original bid. SWCC will take 1 billion liters of the plant's water production capacity. Saudi Arabian Mining Co (Ma'aden) would take 1,350 megawatts and 1,050 MWs would be allocated to Saudi Electricity Co (SEC). Fuhaid Bin Fahd Al-Sharif, governor of SWCC had said the cost of the Ras Azzour project is expected to be 20-25 percent below initial estimates. The project had been estimated to cost $6 billion when Japan's Sumitomo Corp was leading a consortium to build and operate the plant. The project will be a hybrid: 160 MIGD (727,000 m³/d) evaporation and 67.5 MIGD (307,000 m³/d) reverse-osmosis. It will supply water from the Gulf to 3.5 million people in the Riyadh area. Doosan will carry out design, manufacturing, installation and commissioning of the entire process. Completion will be by the end of 2014.
