The bids were opened on 5 June. The bidding groups include Saudi Arabia’s Acwa Power Projects with Korean Electric Power Corporation, using Spain’s Iberdrola Ingenieria y Construccion and South Korea’s Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction as the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractors.

The other bidding group includes Belgium’s Suez Energy International and Kuwait-based Gulf Investment Corporation, with South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries and France’s Degremont as the EPC contractors.

The client, the Finance Ministry, will take about six weeks to evaluate the technical proposals before opening commercial offers on 24 July. An award will be made soon after.

The successful bidder will design, finance, construct and commission the plant on a build-own-operate basis (MEED 11:3:08).

The project will have a capacity of 1,100-1,250MW of power and 218,208 cubic-metres-a-day of desalinated water.

The plant will use natural gas as feedstock, but will also be able to use fuel oil as back-up option. It is due to start commercial operations in 2011.

Three additional phases of power and water facilities will be built at the Addur site over the next 20 years. The schemes are expected to have similar generation capacities to the current project (MEED 8:1:08).

BNP Paribas is the financial adviser on the project. Mott MacDonald and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer are the technical and legal advisers respectively (26:3:08).