Oman doubles up on its desalination plans
Published on by Edyta Bednorz, Global Water Intelligence - Brand Marketing Executive in Business
Authorities in the country are looking to push out two of the sultanate's largest desalination projects to date. They are likely to attract attention from a wide range of investors.
The Oman Power and Water Procurement Company - the body responsible for the country's string of privately financed desalination projects - is focusing its gaze on water, and has doubled its plans for desalination on the northern coast. Plans for a plant at Suwaiq have been shelved after the authorities decided they needed more than twice the capacity planned, and OPWP has now chosen to split the expanded capacity over two sites at Barka and Sohar, both of which have been well-served by desalination projects in the past. The current thinking is to have a 281,000m3/d plant at Barka and a 250,000m3/d plant at Sohar built as a priority, with prequalification scheduled to begin as soon as the end of this quarter. Sites on the north coast close to the major population centres have taken priority over smaller projects which had been under consideration in outlying areas. OPWP is currently in the process of looking for an advisor to undertake planning and design work for the intake structures which will serve the new project at Barka. The two plants would be the largest in the sultanate once completed, with commercial operations at both sites currently slated to begin in 2018. Suwaiq was originally intended to be the next major project after the closing of the Qurayat IWP last year. The contract for the 200,000m3/d Qurayat plant was awarded to a consortium of Hyflux and National Power and Water Co. in December. Oman has had to procure a number of desalination facilities at short notice to cope with rapidly rising demand. As well as brand new facilities, it has also arranged capacity increases at existing operational projects through the negotiation of expanded offtake contracts. Although procurement details for the new plants have not yet been released, they are most likely to follow the structure of other recent projects, which have used a 20-year build-own-operate model, with an attached requirement to float a portion of the project company on the Muscat bourse in the years after commissioning. The open nature of the Omani market, combined with the fact that the desalination plants are both smaller than some of the massive Gulf projects and do not include an attached power element, means that the Omani desalination market has brought in a wide variety of international developers over the years.