Enowa, the utility arm of Saudi Arabia's ambitious Neom project, has announced an extension to the bid deadline for a significant new desalination plant contract, reports MEED. Initially set for 22 May, the deadline has now been pushed to the end of September, according to industry sources.
The contract involves the construction of a seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) desalination plant with a daily capacity of 150 million litres, equivalent to 150,000 cubic metres. Dubbed the Moonlight desalination plant, it will be located next to the existing 125 million litre per day facility at Duba on the Red Sea coast. The project is projected to be completed within 12 months.
The new plant will treat seawater with total dissolved solids up to 42,000 milligrams per litre. Its extensive scope includes offshore intake towers and pipelines, a seawater intake and screening station, and a feed intake chlorination system. Additionally, the plant will feature media filtration or microfiltration/ultrafiltration membranes, reverse osmosis units, post-treatment and stabilisation processes, an automated clean-in-place system, and a waste treatment unit. The project also encompasses reject disposal and outfall systems.
The contractor selected will also be responsible for constructing storage tanks for the desalinated and stabilised water, an operator control room, and installing programmable logic control (PLC) and SCADA systems.
To meet the tight construction timeline, Neom has requested that contractors confirm whether they possess pre-existing plant designs that could be adapted for this project.
In May, Enowa confirmed the cancellation of a separate advanced SWRO project in Oxagon, Neom’s industrial hub, which was to be powered by renewable energy and aimed at achieving zero liquid discharge. The first phase of the now-cancelled project was to be developed by Japan's Itochu Corporation and France's Veolia, with a planned production capacity of 500,000 cubic metres of desalinated water per day.
