UAE Building Two Large Wastewater Facilities

The United Arab Emirates has started construction on a $150-million sewerage and wastewater treatment project serving some 80,000 people in and around Fujairah City, located on the Gulf of Oman. The 30-year build-operate-transfer contract follows a similarly structured $140-million wastewater deal serving about 150,000 people on the other side of the Emirates in Ajman, on the Persian Gulf.

On both projects, teams of investor-operators have signed fixed-price contracts. At Ajman, design and construction is handled by a division of Black & Veatch, Overland Park, Kan., and locally based Six Construct Ltd. Work is due to end in 2007.

Washington, D.C.-based Infrastructure Capital Group ICG, leads the Fujairah project with the UAE government and Fujairah as partners. That team recently signed a $90-million turnkey contract with Germany’s Bilfinger Berger A.G. and its waste-treatment specialist unit, Passavant-Roediger Anlagenbau GmbH. Following three years of construction, Passavant-Roediger will operate the plant for 15 years.

Egyptian LNG Terminal Ready for Business

	Terminal required 850-m-long breakwater.

The big waves and soft ground of the Mediterranean Sea complicated the engineering of what should have been a straightforward design-build project for a $135-million liquefied natural gas terminal in Egypt. Work is just wrapping up as the first gas carrier is due this summer at the terminal, located near Idku, about 50 km east of Alexandria.

The project is the exit point for a $2- billion plant with two 3.5-million-ton-a- year LNG trains. Bechtel Inc., San Francisco, started the engineer/procure/construct contract in late 2002 for Egyptian LNG Co. S.A.E. A Greek-based subcontractor, Archirodon Construction S.A., is handling the terminal using COWI A/S, Copenhagen, as designer.

Work at the terminal includes building a 2.4-km-long access trestle, with 60 spans of 40 m each, sited on steel piles. The project also includes an 850-m-long breakwater in 12 m of sea. Core-loc concrete armor units, some weighing nearly 30 tons, protect the rubble mound wall. "There’s very rough water down there, even though it is at the bottom of the Mediterranean," says Thomas Dahlgren, COWI’s project manager. The design was complicated by the need to address 11-m-high waves, seismic conditions and poor soils, with up to 15 m of soft clay, he notes. COWI used extensive computer soil analysis to define how much soft soil needed replacing.

COWI began work in late 2002, allowing construction to start in the middle of 2003. As COWI winds down in Egypt similar work is continuing at a larger terminal at Ras Laffan, in Qatar. "A lot of the stuff we are doing in this part of the world is design-build," say Dahlgren.

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Turkish Firm Pushes Design-Build Projects

	Designing and building satellite towns has boosted Soyak sales to about $450 million a year.

Soyak Construction & Trading Co., is shopping for an international architect to design its planned 32-floor headquarters in Istanbul. But for its mainstay general contracting business, the firm does design and construction with its own in-house teams, which currently are developing new satellite towns as a growing market.

Soyak’s sales this year will be boosted by about 50% to around $450 million by the satellite town construction projects, says general director Taner Soyak. Its biggest contract, with over 3,500 residential units, is Olympiakent, located near Istanbul, which will generate an estimated $330 million in revenue.

Containing a mixture of houses and apartment buildings, Olympiakent was planned for Soyak by an outside consultant. But after that, "the entire [architectural] design is done by Soyak," says the general director. He notes that "engineering designs are outsourced to engineering subcontractors [because] we don’t have staff for mechanical and electrical design."

Soyak claims his firm is a Turkish market leader in housing, doing most work through design-build. But a large portion of its business also includes design-build industrial facilities. Work on Olympiakent’s three phases began in October 2003 and is due to end in early 2007. Soyak will share sales revenue with the central government in exchange for land use.

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