ACCIONA Agua wins its first contract in Colombia

ACCIONA Agua has been awarded the Design, Build, Operation and Maintenance contract for the Bello Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) in Medellin, Colombia, in a call for tender by the public utilities company Aguas Nacionales EPM de Medellín.  The deal is worth, including construction and operation, around USD347 million (more than 260 million euros). Initially, the plant will service more than three million inhabitants.

The new Bello WWTP will treat wastewater from the municipalities of Medellin and Bello which will reach the plant via the Bello Interceptor, before being pumped into the Medellin River.

The plant is expected to receive around 120 metric tons a day of industrial, commercial and residential organic waste which will be treated using a range of biological, physical and chemical processes prior to being returned to the Medellin River. The objective is to take the river's dissolved oxygen to levels higher than those accepted worldwide as indicators of unpolluted rivers. Reducing the river's organic load helps to meet the water-quality target set by the Aburrá Valley Metropolitan Area which aims to bring down dissolved oxygen levels to an average 5mg/liter. This will help to revitalize a number of riverside areas which could be used for recreation or urban development purposes or could be landscaped.

The WWTP will have a design flow of 5m3/second and will process more than 75% of residential wastewater, covering overall 95% of the water discharged into the Medellin River.

ACCIONA Agua plans to build the necessary infrastructure in the space of 36 months and will handle O&M for a one-year period.

During the construction phase the Bello WWTP will generate around 1,200 direct and indirect jobs.

ACCIONA Agua is a member of the winning consortium, Aguas de Aburrá HHA, which also includes South Korea's Hyundai Engineering and Construction Co. Ltd. and Hyundai Engineering Co. Ltd. The consortium's tender was among eleven from Colombia, South Korea, Brazil, Uruguay, Spain and Mexico, which were considered  applying strict technical criteria, as well as track record and a range of economic, legal and contractual factors.
This is ACCIONA Agua's first contract in Colombia since opening offices there in 2011.

Presence in Latin America

This new contract continues to strengthen the ACCIONA Agua's presence in Latin America, where it is engaged in desalination and water treatment activities. In the past four years, ACCIONA Agua has come away with a number of major contracts, such as Venezuela's very first Reverse Osmosis desalination plant; a technical support and maintenance contract for the Arrudas WWTP (Brazil); the construction of the Peravia drinking water plant in the Dominican Republic and, more recently, between 2010 and 2011, a deal for the world's largest water treatment plant in Atotonilco, in Mexico, a desal plant in Chile's Atacama Valley and two WTPs in Peru.