A consortium led by Spain’s Abeinsa and the local Gharnata International General Trading & Contracting has submitted the low bid for the contract to build a new reverse osmosis (RO) desalination plant in the Doha area of Kuwait.

The consortium submitted a price of KD105.8m ($350m), which was almost 10 per cent lower than the KD117.3m bid submitted by the consortium of South Korea’s Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction and the local Al-Omar Trading & Contracting. The work involves building a 50 million-imperial-gallon-a-day (MIGD) plant.

The Ministry of Electricity & Water (MEW) received bids from six groups on 9 June. One bid was disqualified from the evaluation process.

The other bidders and accepted prices are:

• Hyflux (Singapore)/Thuwainy Trading Company (local), KD134.6m
• OTV (France)/Alghanim International General Trading & Contracting (local), KD152.9m
• Degremont (France)/Hyundai Engineering & Construction (South Korea)/ Rank General Trading & Contracting (local), KD153m

The plant has been tendered as a standard engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract. Nine groups had been prequalified for the tender in July 2014.

A second 50MIGD phase of the Doha project is also planned.

The scheme is part of Kuwait’s efforts to expand its desalination capacity to cope with increasing demand from rapid population growth. The ministry forecasts that an additional 270MIGD of desalination capacity is required to meet the estimated demand by 2020.