Oman Wastewater Services Company (Haya Water) has awarded a contract to Spain’s Cadagua and the local Galfar Engineering & Contracting to build a wastewater treatment plant at Darsait in Oman.

Haya Water awarded the OMR37m ($96m) contract on 31 October. Cadagua and Galfar Engineering & Contracting will design, build, operate and maintain the 50,000-cubic-metre-a-day (cm/d) Darsait plant in Muscat.

Construction of the facility is expected to take about three years to complete. The group will continue to operate the project for a further two and half years.

The contract award marks Cadagua’s third in the region. The company was selected by the Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu to build a 50,400 cm/d seawater reverse osmosis plant in Saudi Arabia. More recently, Cadagua won a contract to build a desalination plant in Ajman in the UAE.

Bids to build the Darsait project were submitted in February. Athens-based Consolidated Contractors Company with France’s Veolia priced the contract at RO59.6m.

France’s Degremont bid RO65.2m. A team of South Korea’s Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction and the local Bahwan Engineering Group submitted two prices, RO77.8m and RO78.9m.

Oman has pioneered the use of membrane bioreactor (MBR) technology. Haya Water already has the world’s largest operational MBR project in operation in the sultanate with a capacity of 55,000 cm/d.