MOU Acwa, Veolia to Optimize Desalination Plants in Saudi Arabia

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Under a MOU signed between Acwa and Veolia, both the companies will work together to optimize the development, design and operation of seawater desalination facilities in Saudi Arabia.

Riyadh/Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – Saudi-listed Acwa has signed a memorandum of understanding with Veolia, committing the two leading companies to optimizing seawater desalination across the entire value chain, covering how plants are designed, what equipment goes into them, how they are dosed and monitored, and how they are run day-to-day.

The collaboration spans the development, design and operation of seawater desalination facilities, with energy efficiency a priority at every stage. Engineers from both companies will work together to further refine operating strategies, plant designs, and equipment selection to reduce power consumption.

Chemical optimization forms the second area, where improved consumption and better dosing design will lower operating costs while limiting environmental impact and strengthening the sustainability performance of the plants involved.

Water quality enhancement is the third area, delivered through advanced monitoring, improved treatment methods and real-time assurance protocols applied while a plant is running.

The fourth brings Veolia’s design capabilities, technical expertise and best practices to bear across Acwa’s operating fleet, with the aim of lifting overall plant efficiency and the standard of operational excellence at each site. Project delivery completes the scope, building on work Acwa and Veolia have already done together, and it commits them to closer cooperation, mutual responsiveness, and a solutions-oriented approach that resolves day-to-day issues as they surface and holds current and future projects to their completion dates.

Raad Al-Saady, Managing Director of Acwa, said: “Between Acwa and Veolia, we have built the most efficient desalination plants in the world, and the lesson those projects taught is that the last increments of cost are rarely sitting in one easily identifiable place and are rather spread across design, procurement, chemistry and operation. This is why we have written this agreement to cover the whole chain instead of the single stage that happens to be easiest to measure.”

Anne Le Guennec, Director of the Water Technologies Zone, Veolia, said: "Through this agreement, thanks to our advanced water technologies, we are offering concrete and effective solutions to renew and preserve water resources. In Saudi Arabia, environmental security, which we build every day with our partners, depends on our collective ability to preserve every drop of water. Here, alongside Acwa, we are accelerating the excellent work carried out for more than 10 years to revolutionize the desalination model, and we continue to put our cutting-edge technologies and expertise at the service of essential infrastructure, competitiveness, and the strategic autonomy of the region."

The savings are measured in fractions of a kilowatt-hour and become material at scale, where four Acwa plants, Rabigh 3, Rabigh 4, Jazlah and Shuaibah 3, each produce 600,000 cubic meters a day, and a tenth of a kilowatt-hour saved per cubic meter cuts roughly 22 GWh from a single site’s annual power consumption. Beyond the Gulf, the same arithmetic will follow the collaboration into the Caspian Sea plant in Azerbaijan and the Grand Côte project in Senegal, where Acwa is building desalination capacity of 300,000 and 400,000 cubic meters a day.

Because Saudi Arabia draws most of its municipal water from the sea, with demand rising against a fixed groundwater base, the Kingdom’s water strategy depends on supply that gets cheaper and less carbon-intensive at each successive plant - an outcome Vision 2030 names directly and one that Acwa’s Saudi capacity of 4.1 million cubic meters a day is run to deliver. The MOU with Veolia commits no capacity and is non-exclusive, built instead around a work program with named technical leads and a review cycle for ongoing and future development of SWRO plants.

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