About €700m (£615m) will be invested in the thermal waste recycling project in Dubai. It will be construced for the the Municipality of Dubai under a build, operate and transfer (BOT) contract that includes 30 years of operation and maintenance.
Besix will be responsible for the design and for the execution of the infrastructure works, civil engineering and construction, as well as for water treatment. It will be working for the first time with Hitachi Zosen Inova, which has over 80 years of experience in the thermal waste recovery sector.
At full capacity, the plant will convert 5,000t of solid waste per day into energy to produce 171MW of electricity per hour – enough to power about 120,000 homes in the region.
Besix said that the plant represents a major step forward in environmental protection, with recovery by heat treatment (incineration, co-incineration, pyrolysis and gasification) making it possible to transform waste that cannot be recycled or recovered otherwise into a source of energy.
The construction of the power plant reflects the municipality's objective of reducing the tipping of municipal waste in favour of developing alternative energy sources.
Over the next six months, the Besix/Hitachi Zosen Inova consortium and its consultants will finalise the design of the project. The construction phase is expected to be launched mid-2018, with partial delivery planned for the World Expo in 2020, and with the plant reaching its final capacity in 2021.
Besix Group CEO Rik Vandenberghe said: "As a multi-service Group operating in the construction and concession sectors in UEA since many decades, and true to our raison d'être of excelling in creating sustainable solutions for a better world, we are enthusiastic participants in this project that will bring real added value to the Dubai community and improve the quality of life of citizens and their environment. This first and very significant waste to energy contract is an important milestone in BESIX' ambition to develop new activities."
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