• Company also part of team commended for Desalination Plant of the Year
KANSAS CITY, MO, May 10, 2007 -- Black & Veatch, a leading global engineering, consulting and construction company, won two prestigious awards at the 2007 Global Water Awards ceremony held recently in Barcelona, Spain. The company earned distinction in the Water Company of the Year category and was part of the team highly commended for the Wadi Ma'in Water Treatment Plant in Jordan as a Desalination Plant of the Year.
"These awards reinforce our leadership position within the water industry throughout the world," said Dan McCarthy, President and CEO of Black & Veatch's global water business. "They also recognize the positive impact of our integrated global workforce in helping our clients cost-effectively address today's water and environmental challenges."
According to the award's sponsor, Black & Veatch earned the Water-Company-of-the-Year Distinction award by establishing itself as a truly global engineering company in the water sector. Local project teams work with multinational water and wastewater treatment process experts to deliver a seamless quality of expertise in consulting, planning, design, design-build and construction management services around the world. During the last year, this offering has been strengthened by Black & Veatch opening its global design center in Singapore and completing an acquisition that doubled the size of its water business in Europe.
Global Water Intelligence, which sponsors the annual Global Water Awards, noted that while other engineering companies have struggled to replicate their strength at home in the international market, Black & Veatch has established itself globally. Successful projects in 2006, such as the largest design-build-operate water project in North America (the 303,000m3/d or 80-million-gallon-per-day Lake Pleasant Water Treatment Plant in Phoenix, Ariz.) and the first independent water and power production facility in North Africa at Arzew in Algeria, also helped Black & Veatch earn the distinction.
The Wadi Ma'in Water Treatment Plant is a 128,767m3/d (34-million-gallon-per-day) brackish water desalination plant and related transmission system including six pumping stations and 45km of pipe to serve the Jordanian capital, Amman. The plant was developed on a design-build-operate basis by Morganti and Infilco Degrémont, with financial support from the United States Agency for International Development. Black & Veatch was the consulting engineer. The plant is owned by the Jordanian Ministry of Water and Irrigation.
Wadi Ma'in is the largest brackish water desalination plant in the world - and one of the most complex. The plant draws from three significantly different water sources with highly variable quality, temperatures ranging from 15° to 45°C and turbidities that can peak at 180 nephelometric turbidity units. This creates an unparalleled engineering challenge for a brackish water plant.
"The successful delivery of this project, including finance, engineering and project management, is especially significant in a region where water scarcity contributes to conflict," McCarthy explained.
Black & Veatch is a leading global engineering, consulting and construction company specializing in infrastructure development in energy, water, telecommunications, management consulting, federal and environmental markets.
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