By John — Desalination News
Elsewedy Utilities, the facilities management division of Egyptian industrial conglomerate Elsewedy Electric, has won a three-year operation and maintenance (O&M) contract for an existing seawater desalination plant at Al-Dabaa on Egypt’s north coast, according to trade publication MEED.
The plant has a capacity of 40,000 cubic metres a day. While the financial terms of the contract were not disclosed, the award reflects a deliberate Egyptian government strategy: transferring operation and maintenance of existing desalination plants with a capacity above 10,000 cubic metres a day to local private-sector operators, rather than keeping them under direct state management.
That strategy is central to how Egypt is trying to close a persistent and growing water gap. The country faces an annual water deficit of around 7 billion cubic metres, driven by a fast-growing population, reliance on the Nile for the vast majority of its freshwater, and the river’s diminished and increasingly contested flow. Desalination has become one of the government’s primary tools to supplement that supply, particularly along the Red Sea and Mediterranean coasts, where tourism and industrial development have created pockets of demand that municipal networks cannot easily reach.
It is worth noting that this O&M award is separate from, and considerably smaller than, the much larger desalination project under construction at the same Al-Dabaa site. Elsewedy Electric Infrastructure, a different arm of the same parent company, is the main engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor for a planned 160,000-cubic-metre-a-day desalination facility at Al-Dabaa, part of Egypt’s broader South Mediterranean (South Med) desalination push. The two projects — one an O&M contract for an existing smaller plant, the other new-build construction of a much larger facility — both carry the Elsewedy name but involve different corporate entities, different capacities, and different contractual relationships with the Egyptian state.
Egypt has pursued an aggressive desalination buildout over the past several years, with a stated national target of dramatically expanding capacity this decade as part of a wider push to diversify water sources beyond the Nile. Private operators like Elsewedy Utilities, along with peers such as Hassan Allam Utilities’ RWD platform, have become increasingly central to that strategy, both for new construction and for the ongoing operation of plants once they are built — a shift that mirrors a broader pattern seen elsewhere in the region, where governments are leaning more heavily on specialized private operators to keep a fast-growing fleet of plants running efficiently.
For Elsewedy Utilities, the Al-Dabaa O&M win adds to a growing operations portfolio in Egypt’s water sector and signals the company’s ambition to be a long-term operational partner for Egyptian water infrastructure, not just a builder of new plants. For Egypt’s government, it is one more incremental step in a strategy aimed at ensuring that desalination capacity, once built, is run efficiently enough to make a meaningful dent in the country’s water deficit.
(Source: MEED)