RIYADH: After seeing off competition from Greece’s Archirodon and the local contracting company Faisal Electromechanical Co. to bag the contract, Beijing-headquartered China Harbour Engineering Corp. has started constructing a major seawater cooling system catering to Jizan City for Primary & Downstream Industries in Saudi Arabia. “The mobilization and construction works have started,” a source close to the project told MEED. The estimated value of the contract is over $650 million, according to MEED. A seawater cooling system is a form of district cooling where water pumps from the sea go through a heat exchanger and cools in a closed loop. Water is then distributed to cool the buildings. The scope of work includes the construction of two seawater supply pipelines, four hypochlorite pipelines and a pumping station. According to MEED Projects data, China Harbour is participating as a contractor in roughly $39 billion worth of projects under construction in the Middle East and African countries. It is also bidding or is prequalified to bid for contracts with an estimated budget of $8.5 billion. JCPDI is the Kingdom’s third industrial hub managed by the Royal Commission for Jubail & Yanbu. It occupies a total area of more than 100 sq. km on the Red Sea coast in southwestern Saudi Arabia. It is located 66km north of the old Jizan City and 11.5km along the coast. JCPDI is located on China’s Belt and Road Initiative and is Saudi Arabia’s closest port to East Asia. It is considered a major gateway to the Kingdom’s southern region, which has an estimated population of 4.5 million people. Its port terminals are expected to support economic growth in the entire region and to serve eastern and southern Africa. In April, the Saudi subsidiary of Spain’s Aqualia won a three-year contract to operate and maintain the desalination plant and drinking water distribution system in JCPDI. The client, Power & Water Utility Co. for Jubail & Yanbu, awarded the contract to Haji Abdullah Alireza & Co. Integrated Services. The desalination plant can treat 60,000 cubic meters a day of water, to serve the industrial city, both for drinking and service water. The development is one of the major infrastructure projects in JCPDI to consolidate the industrial city as a preferred destination for investments in the Kingdom and the Red Sea region. In another development, a joint venture involving Aramco, Air Products and ACWA Power recently finalized agreements for the asset acquisition and project financing of a $12 billion air separation unit/gasification/power plant in JCPDI. The integrated gasification combined cycle plant is located next to Aramco’s refinery, where the vacuum residue, oil left at the bottom of the vacuum distillation column, is piped under the fence to the IGCC’s gasification unit, where heat is used to release more gas from the hydrocarbons as explained on Aramco’s official website. It says in the IGCC plant, vacuum residue is converted to raw syngas by its complete thermal breakdown into combustible gas in the presence of oxygen and steam — called gasification. This raw syngas, further treated within the IGCC, provides clean syngas to a 3.8 GW five-block combined cycle power plant, producing electricity for both the refinery and the Saudi national grid.