ACCIONA Agua boosts its presence in Spain’s Andalusia region with a new contract for a Drinking Water Plant in Jaen province

ACCIONA Agua has been awarded an O&M contract for the Martos Drinking Water Treatment Plant (DWTP) and the Víboras and Quiebrajano reservoirs joint supply network, in Jaen province, in southern Spain. This operation is designed to guarantee the water supply for more than 200,000 inhabitants of the 17 localities in Jaen province.

The Quiebrajano system covers the municipalities of Jaen, Fuerte del Rey, Villadompardo, Escañuela, Arjona, Arjonilla, La Higuera, Porcuna, Lopera, Higuera de Calatrava, Santiago de Calatrava, Cañete de las Torres and Valenzuela, and the Víboras system services Martos, Torredonjimeno, Torredelcampo and Jamilena.

These infrastructures are part of the "Abastecimiento a Jaén" ("Water Supply for Jaen") project; the initial works for this initiative were executed by Spain's Ministry of Agriculture, through the state-run water agency Acuasur, between 2002 and 2005.

The Martos DWTP has a total treatment capacity of 270 liters/second, and is equipped to treat the brackish water needed for maintaining the salinity levels of the Víboras reservoir. The facility was built by Pridesa (the precursor of ACCIONA Agua), and the contract awarded to ACCIONA Agua will run initially for three years, with three one-year extensions. ACCIONA Agua operated the Martos DWTP previously from 2006 to 2010.

ACCIONA Agua has a longstanding presence in Jaen. In 2007 the Company came away with the services contract for the integrated water cycle for 34 municipalities in the province, after creating a joint venture (named Somajasa) with the provincial authorities. The services contract covered the entire integrated water cycle: sanitation, water control, meter reading and the disinfection of the sewer system, among other services, to service more than 250,000 inhabitants.

ACCIONA Agua's services are used by 70 municipalities up and down Spain, covering a total population equivalent of more than three million inhabitants.

ACCIONA's most noteworthy water management contracts in the Andalusia region include the O&M for the Copero Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) and the pumping stations at Guadaira, La Isla, Copero (downstream) and Arroyo Culebras, for a two-year period. The Copero WWTP, located in Dos Hermanas (Seville) has a treatment flow designed to handle 255,000m3, for a population equivalent of more than 1,400,000 inhabitants. It is currently the largest of the several WWTPs that service the city of Seville.

Other major contracts in Andalusia include the integrated water cycle for the Municipal Association of Granada's Costa Tropical, or the municipal public services for the domestic drinking water supply, sewer system and wastewater treatment for the city of Ubeda.

In the rest of Spain, special mention should be made of the drinking water, sanitation and wastewater treatment services for Soria (northern central Spain), the end-to-end water services for Molina de Segura (Murcia, Eastern Spain) or the O&M services for the entire sewer system of the city of Valencia (on Spain's eastern coast). ACCIONA Agua also operates the sewer system for 50% of the Madrid (central Spain) regional territory. In addition, since early 2013, an ACCIONA Agua-led consortium, along with the Brazilian investment bank BTG Pactual, has been handling the management concession for Aigües Ter Llobregat, the company that takes care of the upstream water supply for the city of Barcelona (northeastern Spain), its metropolitan area and nine surrounding zones, serving a total five million inhabitants.