Hyundai E&C has won a super-scale seawater treatment plant construction project worth 4 trillion won in Iraq.
Hyundai E&C said on the 15th that it signed a contract on the 14th (local time) at the Iraqi prime minister's office in Baghdad, Iraq, for the Water Infrastructure Project (WIP), a seawater supply facility project worth about $3 billion.
At the contract signing ceremony were Iraq Prime Minister Muhammad Shia' Al-Sudani, Iraq Oil Minister Hayan Abdul Ghani, Qatar Energy Minister Saad Sherida Al Kaabi, TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné, and key officials including Ryu Seong-an, head of the plant business division at Hyundai E&C.
The WIP project is part of an integrated gas development project covering Iraq's ▲ gas ▲ oil ▲ solar power ▲ seawater treatment. It involves building a seawater treatment plant capable of producing 5 million barrels per day of water near Khor Al-Zubair Port, about 500 kilometers southeast of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.
The water produced here will be used to boost crude output at Iraq's representative oil fields, including West Qurna and South Rumaila, located in southern Basra, Iraq.
The project is a joint investment by French energy corporation TotalEnergies, Basrah Oil Company under the Iraqi Oil Ministry, and Qatar's state-run energy corporation Qatar Energy. The construction period is 49 months after groundbreaking.
Iraq, which boasts the world's fifth-largest oil reserves, relies on crude exports for more than 90% of national revenue. WIP is one of Iraq's key policy projects to increase current oil production of 4.2 million barrels per day to 8 million barrels by 2030.
Since entering Iraq with the first phase of the Basra sewerage project in 1978, Hyundai E&C has built about 40 national key facilities worth $9 billion, including the Al-Mussaib thermal power plant project, the northern railway, Baghdad Medical City, and the Karbala refinery project. WIP is the largest project since the Karbala refinery in Iraq (total project cost $6.04 billion), completed by Hyundai E&C in 2023.
Hyundai E&C plans to continue to identify mega-projects such as upstream oil development, petrochemicals, and industrial facilities in the Middle East, where it traditionally has a competitive edge in winning orders, as with the WIP project. It will strengthen cooperation with global energy companies such as France's TotalEnergies, the United States' ExxonMobil, and Europe's largest oil company Royal Dutch Shell to expand its influence in overseas energy markets.
A Hyundai E&C official said, "We will do our best to secure an advantageous position in bidding across diverse sectors expected to be steadily tendered in Iraq going forward, including refineries, power facilities, and dwellings."