Contractors asked to express interest in Abu Dhabi airport terminal

19 January 2010

Contract worth $6.8bn will be tendered later this year

The Supervision Committee for the Expansion of Abu Dhabi International Airport (Scadia) has invited contractors to express interest in the new contract to build the midfield terminal at the airport.

The new terminal is expected to cost some $6.8bn to develop.

According to the rules set out by Scadia, companies and joint ventures hoping to prequalify for the tender need to have a minimum combined turnover of $5bn a year and have successfully built at least five other airport terminals, with two of them exceeding $1bn in value.

Once Scadia has prequalified companies it will issue tender documents later this year.

The midfield terminal will be built between Abu Dhabi International airport’s two runways. It will have a total built-up area of 630,000 square metres and the capacity to handle 20 million passengers a year. The complex also includes a multi-storey car park.

The company had previously planned to award a build-operate-transfer deal for the terminal building in the second quarter of last year, after France’s Aeroports de Paris, Germany’s Hochtief, and Turkey’s TAV were shortlisted for the contract at the start of 2009.

However, in November last year Scadia told MEED that it had changed its plans and would now develop the project as a construction contract rather than a build-operate-transfer deal.

In December, Scadia invited contractors to express interest in a separate contract to prepare the site for the midfield terminal. The successful bidder will cap the piling and complete excavation work on the project, ahead of a main contractor moving on site to build the terminal later this year (MEED 4:12:09).

Local contractor NSCC has been working on the piling contract since February last year.

US-based Kohn Pederson Fox Associates designed the terminal building. Parsons International, also US-based, is the programme manager.

When the midfield terminal opens at the end of March 2015, it will more than double the airport’s capacity from 12 million to 32 million passengers a year.

A MEED Subscription...

Subscribe or upgrade your current MEED.com package to support your strategic planning with the MENA region’s best source of business information. Proceed to our online shop below to find out more about the features in each package.