Veolia chosen to engineer and deliver large-scale Saudi wastewater treatment plant
Veolia, through its subsidiary Veolia Water Technologies, has been chosen by contractor Tecnicas Reunidas to engineer and procure a wastewater treatment plant in Saudi Arabia.
The plant will be located at the Jazan Refinery and Terminal, a new refinery and terminal in the Kingdom’s southwest wholly-owned and operated by Saudi Aramco, with an expected capacity to process 400,000bpd of Arabian Heavy and Arabian Medium crude once commissioned in 2017.
The Jazan complex will feature a power plant with a total capacity of 4,000MW, for which Veolia will engineer and procure a wastewater treatment facility featuring biological treatment, oily water treatment, and metal removal treatment.
The wastewater facility is scheduled to be commissioned with the refinery and terminal in 2017.
The 1,000m3/h biological treatment package will include state-of-the-art Veolia proprietary technologies such as AnoxKaldnes moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR), Actiflo and Multiflo high-rate clarifiers and Hydrotech discfilters.
Oily water treatment will be achieved by combining two Veolia technologies developed specifically for the oil and gas market, the MPP TiPSS tilted plate interceptor (TPI) and the Whittier Power Clean technology, which is a nutshell filter media designed for effective removal of oil and suspended solids.
Finally, Multiflo and various chemicals will be used in the third treatment step to remove metals. The deoiling and metal removal treatment steps will both have a capacity of 550m3/h.
Past experience
With operations in Saudi Arabia for more than 30 years, Veolia operates city water management, waste, and cooling urban network services.
In 2008 in particular, the group won a contract with National Water Company (NWC) to improve the overall performance of the water and wastewater services used by nearly 6 million people in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
This project greatly improved the drinking water network performance (now 82%), connected more than 100,000 households to the sewerage system, and improved customer management (now 85% customer satisfaction).
Particularly involved in desalination projects in the Kingdom, Veolia also supports numerous industrial customers, especially in the oil, gas, and mining sectors, to help them improve their environmental performance.
Veolia has worked on several projects for Saudi Aramco, including a desalination plant which supplies the Sadara petrochemical complex built by Dow Chemical and Saudi Aramco in Jubail City.
Veolia’s specialised subsidiary SIDEM, present in Saudi Arabia since 1979, has also built the desalination plant for the city of Al Khobar in the Eastern Province, near the Arabo-Persian Gulf.
In 2010, Sidem had already built in Jubail City one of the largest and most efficient desalination plants in the world.
This 800,000 m3/d capacity plant uses Veolia's multiple-effect distillation (MED) process, which consumes three times less energy than rival processes, the company claims.
