By John — Desalination News
Veolia has been awarded the design contract for Sharjah’s Al Hamriyah seawater desalination plant, with the French utility group engineering the 410,000-cubic-meter-a-day facility to run at what it describes as a new energy-efficiency benchmark for large-scale desalination.
The contract, announced by Veolia on November 5 as part of a wider push into Middle East desalination worth nearly €200 million, covers the pretreatment and remineralization systems for Al Hamriyah, which is designed to supply drinking water to roughly 1.4 million people once complete. Veolia said the plant’s design targets energy consumption of 2.75 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter of water produced, a figure the company is positioning as a new efficiency marker for seawater reverse osmosis plants at this scale. The design calls for dissolved air flotation, dual-media pressure filters and limestone filtration to prepare and remineralize the water before it reaches consumers.
Al Hamriyah has already drawn attention this month for a different reason. Days before Veolia’s announcement, the Sharjah Electricity, Water and Gas Authority unveiled more than $1.4 billion in water and energy investments that included a disclosure that the plant’s full capacity would not be reached until the fourth quarter of 2028, later than either SEWA or the project’s developer, ACWA Power, had previously indicated. Veolia’s design win fills in a piece of that picture, naming the company responsible for the technical blueprint the plant will be built to and giving the first detailed look at the performance Sharjah’s utility is expecting in return for the delay. Lower energy consumption translates directly into lower operating costs for a region where desalination already accounts for the overwhelming majority of drinking water supply, and where electricity used to power reverse osmosis membranes is one of the largest ongoing costs of running a plant.
Veolia’s announcement bundled the Al Hamriyah win with a second Gulf contract, a five-year agreement to operate and optimize the Al Asilah desalination plant in Oman, where Veolia’s joint venture with Bahwan Engineering Company began operations and maintenance work last month on an 80,000-cubic-meter-a-day plant serving around 200,000 people. That Al Asilah facility is being fitted with a solar farm to diversify its energy mix, along with Veolia’s Hubgrade digital monitoring tools, part of a broader pattern of pairing desalination capacity with renewable power and remote monitoring across the company’s Gulf portfolio. Taken together, Veolia said the two contracts add 490,000 cubic meters a day to its operated and designed capacity in the region, part of a stated ambition to reach 1.4 million cubic meters a day of operated desalination capacity in the Middle East by 2030.
The company already has a substantial footprint in the Gulf, with past or current involvement in UAE projects including Hassyan in Dubai, Mirfa 2 in Abu Dhabi, and plants in Umm Al Quwain and Fujairah, and it operates four large-scale desalination plants in Oman, including the Sur plant, which serves nearly 2.5 million people. Veolia chief executive Estelle Brachlianoff described desalination as a cornerstone of water security for the region, a framing that reflects how central the technology has become to Gulf states’ long-term planning as populations grow and freshwater sources beyond the sea remain scarce.
No construction timeline or commissioning date for Al Hamriyah was disclosed alongside the design contract, and Veolia’s statement did not name the client or the other parties involved in delivering the plant. With SEWA’s 2028 completion target already on the record, the next milestones to watch will be the award of the plant’s construction and equipment-supply contracts and any further detail on how the project’s cost and schedule have shifted since it was first announced.
(Source: Veolia, Smart Water Magazine)