Canada’s SNC Lavalin has been awarded a $450m contract by the local Great Man Made River Authority (GMMRA) to develop the Al-Kufra wellfield in Libya.

The project is part of the major GMMR water supply project currently under construction, which will transport water from the southern Libyan desert to urban areas in the north.

SNC-Lavalin will design the Al-Kufra wellfield system and carry out all of the construction work required to connect the new wellfield to the existing water distribution system. The work will involve the installation of collector pipelines, pumps in 300 deep-wells, the power supply and communications system.

“This new contract reflects the authority’s confidence in our ability to design and build challenging projects, which has been our trademark in Libya for more than 25 years,” said Riadh Ben Aissa, executive vice-president, SNC-Lavalin Group.

The Al-Kufra scheme will provide an additional 1.7 million cubic metres of water a day to the GMMR main spine and will increase the hydraulic capacity of the existing conveyance systems in order to transport this additional flow.