Kuwait’s Central Tenders Committee (CTC) has approved the award of the estimated KD117.3m ($388m) contract to South Korea’s Doosan Heavy Industries to build a new reverse osmosis (RO) desalination plant in the Doha area of Kuwait.

Doosan’s winning bid was almost 10 per cent higher than the KD105.8m price submitted by the low bidder, a consortium of Spain’s Abeinsa and the local Gharnata International General Trading & Contracting. The Ministry of Electricity & Water (MEW), the client for the project, received bids from six groups on 9 June for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract.

The Doha phase one plant will have a desalination capacity of 50 million imperial gallons a day (MIGD).

A second 50-MIGD phase of the project is also planned.

The scheme is part of Kuwait’s efforts to expand its desalination capacity to cope with increasing demand from rapid population growth. The ministry forecasts that an additional 270 MIGD of desalination capacity is required to meet the estimated demand by 2020.

On 15 August, Kuwait’s MInistry of Finance approved KD3bn-worth of power, desalination and wastewater projects.

In addition to the Doha desalination EPC project, Kuwait’s public-private partnership (PPP) body, the Kuwait Authority for Public Partnerships (KAPP), is pushing ahead with major power and desalination schemes.

In August, KAPP released the lists of prequalifiers for the Al-Zour North 2 and Al-Khiran 1 independent water and power projects (IWPPs), which will have desalination capacities of 102 MIGD and 125 MIGD respectively.