Saudi Arabian Mining Company (Maaden) has awarded the US’s Jacobs Engineering the front-end engineering and design (feed) contract for its planned $6bn phosphates mining city.

The engineering contractor has secured the contract amid strong competition from rival bidders including the US’ KBR and Australia’s WorleyParsons.

“[Jacobs] has got the right background in phosphates projects to execute this contract, but we all thought it was going to be awarded to WorleyParsons due to their track record with Maaden,” says a contracting source based in Saudi Arabia. “It is a lot of work so Jacobs must be happy with this win.”

The contract for the feed is estimated to be in the region of 400,000 man hours. The work will cover about $4bn of the overall budget.

The city, which will be constructed at Waad al-Shamal in the north of the kingdom, is being planned so Maaden can fully utilise the phosphates from its Al-Khabra mine.

The scope of works for the city will include a mining component, as well as eight different processing plants and a utilities and offsites package. The winning company for the feed and PMC will be carrying out work for about $4bn-worth of the total budget.

The phosphate produced at Al-Khabra is low in heavy metal content and thus ideal to be used for food production, as well as fertiliser and animal feed. The measured reserves of the Al-Khabra deposit are estimated to be 236 million tonnes.

Riyadh also plans to use the city as a catalyst for the economic development of the area. Waad al-Shami will become the major phosphates hub in the kingdom and a major downstream phosphates cluster for attracting international companies is also planned for the area.

Maaden will not run the city and are in talks to appoint an operator by the middle of 2012. Jacobs and Maaden were not available for comment when contacted by MEED.