Saudi plans two more giant desalination plants

Saudi Arabia’s Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) has unveiled plans to build two huge sea water desalination plants including a vast 1.5 million m³/day capacity hybrid plant with 30% of its production coming from reverse osmosis and the rest from thermal desalination.

The plans for the vast multi stage flash (thermal) plant for Jubail and a 400,000 m³/day sea water reverse-osmosis (SWRO) desalination plant at Jeddah came on the heels of SWCC’s announcement of plans to build a 600,000 m³/day SWRO plant at Rabigh on the Red Sea Coast which would be the world’s largest SWRO facility.
The plants are in an early design stage but SWCC has outlined some of the preliminary technical requirements. The targeted energy consumption for the projects will be 4.2-4.8 kWh/m³ and they will employ a two-pass design with hollow fibre RO elements in the first pass and spiral- wound elements in the second pass.
Tentative plans are to release tender documents for the Jeddah project in January 2015 and the other projects in September 2015.