Saudi Arabia’s Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) has selected Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction to build a desalination plant at Yanbu.

The contract for the multi-effect desalination (MED) facility is worth $124m. The project, which will be built next to several previously constructed desalination facilities, will have a capacity of 15 million gallons a day (g/d).

Doosan Heavy & SWCC jointly will execute engineering, fabrication, installation, commissioning, and all other related scopes of work, while operation and maintenance of the unit will be conducted by SWCC.

Also at the Yanbu site is the first phase of Yanbu power and water project, which has a capacity of 357MW of power and 24.2 million g/d in multi-stage flash (MSF) desalination capacity. It was completed in 1981.

Phase two of the project was completed in 1999 and has a capacity of 150MW in power and 31.7 million g/d of water using MSF technology.

The third phase, which was completed in 1999, had a capacity of 28.2 million g/d.

Yanbu is located about 350 kilometres from Jeddah. The new facility will supply water to Almadina in Almadina province.

Doosan won a $1.76bn contract from SWCC to build a 228 million g/ds hybrid desalination plant combining multi-stage flash and reverse osmosis technologies at Ras al-Zour in November 2010.