Saudi Arabia’s Neom is expected to award the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for a seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) desalination plant with a capacity of 150 million litres a day between March and April.

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

It will be located adjacent to the existing 125MLD desalination plant at Duba on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast. 

MEED reported that Neom received prequalification applications from interested companies in December.

Neom initially expected to issue the request for proposals for the contract this month and award the tender between March and April.

The project is expected to take 12 months to complete.

Neom said the plant will treat seawater with a total dissolved solids (TDS) measure 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 necessary storage tanks for the desalinated and stabilised water, operator control room, programmable logic control and SCADA systems, among others.

In addition, the plant is required to comply with Neom’s cybersecurity requirements.

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

This project’s capacity is smaller than the zero liquid discharge (ZLD) desalination plant being developed by Japan’s Itochu and France’s Veolia at Neom’s Oxagon industrial city.

The ZLD plant’s first phase is expected to have a capacity of 500,000 cm/d.

A consortium of Neom subsidiary Enowa, Itochu and Veolia signed the joint development for the ZLD desalination plant in December 2022.

The planned ZLD plant will be powered 100% by renewable energy and is understood to require an investment of between $1.5bn and $2bn. It is expected to meet about 30% of Neom’s projected total water demand once complete.