Kuwait’s Partnerships Technical Bureau (PTB) is preparing to tender the second phase of its Al-Zour North power development in Kuwait.

Speaking at MEED’s Kuwait Energy & Water Efficiency conference, in Kuwait City on 3 June, Meshan al-Otaibi, assistant undersecretary of planning and training at the Ministry of Electricity & Water (MEW), said the PTB was currently preparing tender documents for the Al-Zour North 2 independent water and power project (IWPP). Following this, the PTB will seek to invite prequalification and proposals as soon as possible.

The PTB invited companies to express interest in the Al-Zour North 2 IWPP in June last year, and has set a target commissioning date for the plant of 2018. The Al-Zour North 2 IWPP will have a generation capacity of 1,500MW, through combined-cycle gas turbines, and will have a water desalination capacity of 102 million imperial gallons a day (MIGD). The technology for the desalination component is still under consideration.

The future third and fourth planned phases of the Al-Zour site will have a combined power capacity of about 1,800MW, and are scheduled to come online before 2020.

In December, the final project agreements were signed on the Al-Zour North IWPP. The project company set up to develop the IWPP, which is 40 per cent owned by a consortium of the UK/French GDF Suez, Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation and local Abdullah Hama al-Sagar & Brothers, awarded South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) and France’s Sidem the $1.4bn contract to build the Al-Zour North scheme.

HHI will build the gas-fired 1,500MW, combined-cycle power plant, while Sidem will build the 107 million gallon-a-day desalination component of the Al-Zour project. The consortium is scheduled to complete the construction of the country’s first IWPP in the fourth quarter of 2016.