By John — Desalination News
A subsidiary of Chinese state-owned construction giant PowerChina has been awarded a $1.32 billion contract to design and build the water transmission system for one of the world’s largest seawater desalination schemes, in the latest sign of accelerating investment in southern Iraq’s water infrastructure.
China Water Resources & Hydropower Fifth Engineering Bureau Company, a unit of PowerChina, secured the deal — worth roughly RMB 8.925 billion — from Iraqi developer Al-Ridha Group, according to trade publication MEED. The contract covers the pipeline network that will carry desalinated water away from the Basra Seawater Desalination Project (BSDP), rather than the treatment plant itself.
What the contract covers. The scope is substantial in its own right: approximately 240 kilometers of transmission pipeline, one main pumping station, and nine receiving pumping stations, sized to move up to one million cubic meters of desalinated water per day. Work is structured around a six-month limited commencement period, followed by a 1,350-day main construction phase and a 24-month defects liability period, though the actual start date depends on Al-Ridha Group and its partners satisfying a number of preconditions first.
Part of a much larger project. The transmission contract is a slice of a far bigger undertaking. The BSDP itself was first announced in mid-2025, when Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani launched a roughly $4 billion project led by PowerChina to build Iraq’s first large-scale seawater desalination facility, paired with a dedicated 300-megawatt power plant to supply it with electricity. That plant, also with a targeted capacity of one million cubic meters a day, is aimed at commercial operations by June 2028, according to Iraqi News and corroborating Reuters reporting carried by Zawya. Iraqi officials have described plans for four additional desalination plants in Basra province beyond this one.
Basra’s water problems are severe and well documented: saltwater intrusion up the Shatt al-Arab waterway, compounded by upstream damming and reduced river flow, has left much of the province’s water too saline for drinking or irrigation for parts of the year, contributing to public health crises and hospitalizations in years past. Large-scale seawater desalination, rather than treatment of increasingly brackish river water, has become the Iraqi government’s preferred long-term fix.
This is not the only major water-transmission investment underway in the province. A separate $2.5 billion contract for the Common Seawater Supply Project (CSSP) — a 950-kilometer seawater pipeline network intended primarily to support oilfield operations — was signed in September 2025 between state-run Basra Oil Company and China Petroleum Pipeline Engineering, with Austria’s ILF Consulting Engineers overseeing supervision. Together, the two schemes point to a broader pattern: Chinese state contractors taking on an increasingly central role in rebuilding Iraq’s water and energy infrastructure, financed and structured largely outside Western institutions.
Why it matters. For Basra’s roughly four million residents, the transmission network matters as much as the treatment plant itself — a desalination facility is only useful if the water it produces can actually reach households, farms, and industry across the province. The scale of the pipeline contract also underscores how capital-intensive desalination infrastructure has become in Iraq, where the BSDP now ranks among the largest seawater desalination undertakings globally by capacity and cost.
The deal also illustrates the growing weight of Chinese engineering and construction firms in Gulf and Iraqi water infrastructure more broadly, alongside established Western and Gulf players such as ACWA Power and Veolia. With commercial operations at BSDP still targeted for 2028, the coming two to three years will be a test of whether financing, construction, and the various preconditions attached to this latest contract can stay on schedule for a project already central to Iraq’s plans for water security in its south.
(Source: MEED) (Source: Zawya) (Source: Iraqi News)