Dubai: The Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, Dewa, has awarded an Dh871 million contract for the construction of a 40 Million Imperial Gallons Per Day, MIGD, Seawater Reverse Osmosis, SWRO, based desalination plant in Jebel Ali, to a joint venture comprising ACCIONA Agua S.A and Belhasa Six Construct, BeSIX.
This new SWRO plant is being developed as a brownfield seawater desalination plant and associated facilities, with the selected desalination technology being SWRO, two (2) pass reverse osmosis, RO, including pre-treatment facilities.
This plant is expected to be commissioned by May 2020 to meet the reserve margin criterion set for peak water demand for the year 2020 and beyond.
“In line with Dubai Clean Energy Strategy 2050, which aims to reduce Dubai’s carbon footprint to be the smallest in the world by 2050, we work to increase the efficiency of the water production plants through promoting PV panels and other solar technologies,” said Saeed Mohammad Al Tayer, MD and CEO of Dewa. “To ensure this, we need to connect multi-stage flash distillation, MSF, based plants to a centralised solar energy source such as the MBR Solar Park, so our strategy is to build production plants based on RO, which requires 90 per cent less energy than that of MSF, making it a more sustainable choice for water desalination.
“This project is in line with our decoupling plans for water desalination and power production and water desalination using solar energy. The big projects launched by Dewa have contributed to reducing the production cost of electricity through solar energy on a global level and we continue to decouple electricity production from water desalination to obtain 100 per cent desalinated water using a mix of clean energy and waste heat by 2030.
“This will allow Dubai to exceed global targets for using clean energy to desalinate water. Reverse Osmosis will help expand our production capacity to 305 million gallons of desalinated water per day by 2030. Eventually, reverse osmosis will produce 41 per cent compared to its current share of 5 per cent, so we will be able to produce 750 million gallons of desalinated water per day by 2030, compared to our current capacity of 470 million gallons per day. Also, increasing the operational efficiency of the decoupling process will save around AED13 billion and reduce 43 tonnes of carbon emissions by 2030,” Al Tayer said.
