France’s Veolia has been awarded a contract by the UK’s BP to design and build a $50m wastewater treatment plant at its Khazzan gas field in Oman.

Veolia will design, build and operate the wastewater plant for one year, with the possibility of the operation contract being extended to four years. The facility will have a capacity of 6,000 cubic metres a day (cm/d), which will be split between 4,000 cm/d of process water and 2,000 cm/d of drinking water.

The plant is scheduled to start delivering water from January 2015.

The Omani government signed an agreement with BP to develop the Khazzan tight gas field, located 350 kilometres southwest of Muscat, in December 2013, following months of negotiations.  

The estimated $16bn full-field development will involve a drilling programme of about 300 wells over 15 years, with target output equal to a third of the sultanate’s current gas production.

The Khazzan water scheme is the second major water deal Veolia has won in the Gulf in 2014. In February, the French company, in consortium with Japan’s Hitachi and Egypt’s Arabco, was awarded a $115m deal to build a desalination plant in the southern city of Basra in Iraq.

The contract will involve the construction and engineering of an ultrafiltration unit with reverse osmosis (RO) membranes. The expected capacity of the plant is 200,000 cm/d and will provide clean drinking water to the 2.3 million residents of Basra.