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Enowa expects desalination plant bids by month-end

26 September 2024

 

Enowa, the utility subsidiary of Saudi gigaproject developer Neom, has extended by one week the tender closing deadline 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 deadline is now 30 September.

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

Enowa tendered the engineering, procurement and construction 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 for 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 discharge 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

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