The Dow Chemical Company has appointed Fluor Corporation to build a new factory to manufacture reverse osmosis components for desalination plants in Saudi Arabia.
Fluor will build the plant at Jubail Industrial City II in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province under an engineering, procurement and construction contract. The factory will be the first reverse osmosis manufacturing plant Dow has built outside the US. It is scheduled for completion by the end of 2015.
More than 100 jobs will be created at the facility which will manufacture a range of Dow reverse osmosis products including Dow’s FILMTEC brackish water reverse osmosis elements and seawater reverse osmosis elements. The facility will supply the Saudi market and markets in the rest of the Middle East and Africa. Dow said the tremendous water scarcity in Saudi Arabia made it the one of the largest seawater desalination markets in the world.
Dow anticipates the factory will also serve other regions where water needs are critical including Eastern Europe, India, China and South East Asia.
President of Dow Saudi Arabia, Zuhair Allawi, said he was confident that Fluor “will bring significant added value to the project.”
Dow Water and Process Solutions global business director, Snehal Desai, said “This investment complements our activities at the Dow KSA Research Center at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology where our research focuses specifically on RO solutions in combination with ultra-filtration (UF) pre-treatment for seawater desalination.”
The factory will be built close to the US$ 20 billion Sadara chemical complex Dow is building alongside Saudi Aramco.