Jordan’s Ministry of Water and Irrigation is currently in negotiations with developers over plans for a second build, operate and transfer (BOT) wastewater project on the Dead Sea Coast.

“We are planning our documents – RFPs and so on for next year when we will be asking private sector to be involved in wastewater treatment and re-use,” Mohammad Najjar, director of Programme Management Unit at the Water & Irrigation Ministry told MEED.

The Dead Sea project is understood to have been chosen as the next BOT due to the higher potential revenues that can be raised from a facility serving hotels and tourists, compared with the heavily subsidised tariffs paid by domestic users.

For future BOTs, the government anticipates providing considerable up-front financing towards capital constructions costs, as was the case at the $169m Al-Samra plant in Amman, which began operations in April 2008. Samra Project Company took over the existing 68,000 cubic metres a day (cm/d) works and built a new 267,000 cm/d plant under a 25 year public-private partnership (PPP) agreement. The government provided about 55 per cent of the required capital investment.