Kuwait has cancelled the tender for the planned Al-Zour North 2 independent water and power project (IWPP), some 14 months after bids were submitted.

In a statement published on state news agency website Kuna on 24 August, it was announced that the tender for the Al-Zour North 2 project, the country’s second planned IWPP, has been cancelled. The country’s public-private partnership (PPP) body, Kuwait Authority for Partnership Projects (KAPP), is now planning to integrate the previously planned Al-Zour North 2 and 3 IWPPs into one project, which will be retendered as one project.

The decision to retender the project is reportedly due to ’technical and legal deviations’ in the bids.

KAPP received bids from three developers for the Al-Zour North 2 IWPP in June 2016, and had invited two of the three bidders for clarification meetings and further negotiations. The project faced several delays in the prequalification and bidding stages. The remaining two bidders, led by Japanese developers Marubeni and Sumitomo, were asked in March this year to extend bid bonds by six months from April to October. They were recently asked to extend bonds further until March 2018.

The Al-Zour North 2 IWPP was planned to have a power generation capacity of 1,500MW and a desalination component of at least 102 million imperial gallons a day (MIGD). The planned Al-Zour North 3 IWPP was originally planned to have a power generation capacity of 1,800MW and a desalination component of 75 MIGD. It is unclear when the plans for the projects are integrated what the capacities will be.

Kuwait’s first IWPP, Al-Zour North 1, was fully commissioned in late 2016. Following a number of delays with the tendering of the country’s first IWPP, the government amended the PPP law in 2014 and reformed the PPP body, changing its name to KAPP from the Partnerships Technical Bureau (PTB).

It introduced Law 116/2014 (the “PPP Law”), which superseded the previous law for PPP projects in Kuwait. The law restructured the PPP programme and codified some of the methods used in the procurement of the Al-Zour North IWPP to provide a comprehensive structure for procuring major projects. The executive regulations were published in March 2015.