Jordan awards Aqaba-Amman water PPP contract
13 January 2025
The Jordanian government has signed the contract to develop the kingdom’s largest planned water infrastructure project.
Jordan’s Ministry of Water & Irrigation (MWI) and a consortium led by the Paris-based investment and utility firms Meridiam and Suez have signed the contract, the Jordan News Agency (Petra) reported on 12 January.
Estimated to cost $2bn-$3bn, the Aqaba-Amman water desalination and conveyance build, operate and transfer (BOT) project is Jordan’s single largest planned infrastructure scheme to date.
The BOT contract is for 26 years.
The project’s water desalination plant will have the capacity to treat 300,000 cubic metres a day (cm/d), extendable to up to 835,000 cm/d, using reverse osmosis-based technology.
It also includes 450 kilometres of pipelines to transport desalinated water from the Gulf of Aqaba to Amman, “incorporating cutting-edge seawater intake mechanisms, high-capacity pumping stations and renewable energy infrastructure”.
In addition to Meridiam and Suez, the developer consortium includes Egypt’s Orascom Construction and France’s Vinci Construction Grands Projets.
The consortium submitted the sole bid for the contract in December 2023, as MEED reported.
The developer team expects to reach financial close for the project this year, a source close to the project previously told MEED.
The project is crucial to addressing Jordan’s severe water scarcity issue. The kingdom is one of the world’s most water-stressed countries, consuming nearly 1 billion cubic metres of water a year.
The domestic sector consumes approximately 50% of this, with only 61 cubic metres of water available per person a year, far below the global absolute water scarcity level of 500 cubic metres of water per capita.
Jordanian Prime Minister Bisher Khasawneh announced in August last year that a team comprising Meridiam and Suez and their partners had been chosen to implement the project.
The project is supported by the US International Development Finance Corporation and the US Agency for International Development (Usaid) in Amman, which has also been advising the Jordanian government on the project.
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