Kuwait’s Partnerships Technical Bureau (PTB) says that financial close for the country’s first independent water and power project (IWPP) will be reached “within days”.

“We are in the final stages now. Lawyers are working on the final details, the financing has been obtained and the [power] company has been formed. The agreement has been signed between the PTB, the Ministry of Electricity [& Water (MEW)] and the developer,” Adel Alroumi, director-general at the PTB, told MEED’s Kuwait Projects 2013 conference on 26 November.

When asked to clarify when financial closure would be reached, Alroumi confirmed it was expected to be “within days, rather than weeks”.

The PTB awarded the consortium of UK/French company GDF Suez, Japan’s Sumitomo and Kuwait’s AH Sagar & Brothers Group the contract to build the Al-Zour North IWPP in January, but the financing agreements have not yet been concluded.

The PTB selected the winning consortium as the preferred bidder in February 2012, but the project stalled when Kuwait’s National Assembly voted to scrap the scheme in June that year.

The successful consortium had submitted the lowest bid to build the project with an annual equivalent payment (AEP) value – the yearly payment to the developer over the lifetime of the project – of KD127.1m ($453m).

The GDF-led consortium will design, finance, build, operate and maintain the plant, which will have a power capacity of 1,500MW and 102-107 million gallons a day (g/d) of desalinated water. The project was initially scheduled to enter commercial operation by 31 May 2015, but this target is unlikely to be met due to the delays in closing financing.

The project will use natural gas as its main feedstock and gas oil as back-up fuel. Gas and gas oil will be provided by the MEW. The desalination plant will use either a 100 per cent thermal process or a hybrid process. In the case of a hybrid solution, the capacity of the reverse-osmosis plant is not to exceed 25 per cent of the total desalination capacity.

A special-purpose vehicle (SPV) will be established as a Kuwaiti public joint-stock company, with 40 per cent owned by the successful bidder. The remainder will be held by a combination of Kuwaiti public entities directly and Kuwaiti nationals.

The Al-Zour North IWPP has long been viewed by those in Kuwait’s projects and finance sectors as a key project for Kuwait’s ambitious PPP programme. As the PTB’s first project, it is regarded as a catalyst for the rest of the country’s planned schemes, which require private investment.

When financial close for the Al-Zour North IWPP is reached, the PTB and the MEW will push ahead with the next phase of the Al-Zour development, Al-Zour North 2 IWPP. In June, the PTB invited companies to express interest in the second phase of the Al-Zour scheme, which will have similar scope and the same power and water desalination capacities as the first phase.