Acwa signs $400M deal to develop desalination plant in Indonesia

Snapshot of the agreement signing

ACWA Power (Acwa) signed a joint development agreement with PT GARAM, Indonesia’s state-owned salt producer, to develop the country’s first integrated seawater desalination and industrial salt production facility.

The salt production facility will be developed under a build-own-operate (BOO) model through a project company established in Indonesia, using a limited- or non-recourse financing structure backed by the project’s own cash flows, the company said in an emailed statement to Argaam.

The project, valued at around $400 million, is planned at Manyar in Gresik, East Java. It will combine a seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) desalination plant with an integrated industrial salt production line.

The facility will have a production capacity of around 62,500 cubic meters of desalinated water per day and nearly 500,000 tons of high-purity industrial salt annually.

The Gresik project aims to boost domestic salt supplies by recovering high-purity salt as a byproduct of the desalination and brine management process, while providing a reliable source of desalinated water for industrial use, according to the statement.

Indonesia currently imports more than four million tons of industrial salt annually, with demand expected to exceed 7.7 million tons by 2028. Subject to commercial feasibility, the project could also enable the recovery of additional marine minerals from the same process.