Meed | Neom likely to extend desalination bid deadline

Neom likely to extend desalination bid deadline

2 September 2024

Companies are preparing to submit their proposals by 23 September for a contract to build a new seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) desalination plant with a capacity of 150 million litres a day (l/d) in Neom.

The 150 million l/d project, which is equivalent to a capacity of 150,000 cubic metres a day (cm/d), was previously known as the Moonlight desalination plant.

A source close to the project expects that an extension to the current tender closing deadline is likely, however.

Enowa, the utility subsidiary of Saudi gigaproject developer Neom, tendered the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract in April with an initial bid deadline of 22 May.

The SWRO plant will be located adjacent to the existing 125 million l/d desalination plant at Duba on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast.

The project is expected to take 12 months to complete.

Neom said that the plant will treat seawater with total dissolved solids of up to 42,000 milligrams a litre.

The project scope includes:

offshore intake towers and pipelines
seawater intake and screening station
feed intake chlorination system
media filtration or MF/UF membranes
reverse osmosis first pass
reverse osmosis second pass
post-treatment and stabilisation
automated clean-in-place system
waste treatment unit
reject disposal and outfall

The selected contractor is also expected to build the necessary storage tanks for the desalinated and stabilised water, an operator control room and programmable logic control and Scada systems.

To meet the short deadline, Neom has asked contractors to confirm whether they already possess a design of an existing plant that can be used for the project.

In May, Enowa confirmed the cancellation of a project to develop a renewable-energy powered advanced SWRO project with zero liquid discahrge in Oxagon, Neom’s industrial cluster.

The scope of the cancelled project's first phase, which was due to be developed by a team of Japan's Itochu Corporation and France's Veolia, included a desalination plant with a production capacity of 500,000 cm/d of desalinated water.

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Jennifer Aguinaldo