Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company (Masdar) has compiled a list of firms it wants to bid on its first major carbon capture and storage project in the emirate and hopes to release a formal tender for the contract in the third quarter of the year.

International engineering firms handed in their prequalification applications for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract in the first week of May.

Veco Engineering, a subsidiary of US/Canadian CH2M Hill, has finished assessing the firms’ applications on behalf of Masdar and has passed on its recommendations to the company, sources close to the project tell MEED.

Contractors expect the company to release a formal invitation to bid on the project in early June. Among the firms likely to bid on the scheme are South Korea’s Samsung Engineering and Hyundai Engineering & Construction alongside Taiwan’s CTCI Corporation.

The deal covers the construction of facilities to capture and process up to 800,000 tonnes a year (t/y) of carbon dioxide produced at Emirates Steel Industries’ Mussafah steel rolling mill. Contractors expect an award by the end of 2010 or in the first quarter of 2011.

The project will be the first of various sustainable energy and carbon capture and storage schemes which the company, wholly owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, plans to develop.

Masdar was set up in 2008 as part of an initiative to develop alternative and renewable energy and to cut the emirate’s carbon emissions.

Masdar wants to build carbon capture facilities at its planned $2bn joint venture Shuweihat hydrogen power plant with the UK’s BP, the Mussafah mill, Emirates Aluminium’s (Emal) Taweelah power plant and at a second independent water and power plant (IWPP) also at Taweelah.

In total, the company says it will process 5 million t/y of carbon dioxide from 2014 onwards, which it wants to sell to Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) for injection into the state energy giant’s oilfields. It wants to sell the power produced at Shuweihat to Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority (Adwea)