Jubail Is Building the Middle East's Most Ambitious Water Recycler

The Middle East's largest industrial water recycling project breaks ground in Jubail after closing $500M in financing

1 May 2026

Construction is underway on the Middle East's largest industrial water reuse facility. The $500 million Jubail project closed its financing on February 12, 2026, and has since mobilized Orascom Construction as its EPC contractor, marking the shift from paperwork to groundwork.

The plant will serve SATORP's Amiral petrochemical complex, an roughly $11 billion development in Jubail Industrial City that is more than half-built and targeting commissioning by end-2027. Under a 30-year concession, the facility will treat and recycle nearly 8.8 million cubic meters of industrial effluent annually, including spent caustic streams, returning cleaned output as demineralized process water for direct reuse. Nothing comparable exists in the region at this scale or technical specification.

Ownership sits with Aqua Renew, a special purpose vehicle split between Marafiq at 40 percent, Veolia Middle East at 35%, and Lamar Arabia for Energy at 25%. Four lenders backed the financing: First Abu Dhabi Bank, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, Korea Development Bank, and Qatar National Bank. The treatment stack combines moving bed biofilm reactors, ZeeWeed ultrafiltration membranes, and carbon-enhanced clarification, a configuration purpose-built for the chemical complexity of petrochemical effluents that conventional systems routinely struggle to handle.

The ambition here runs wider than a single client. Jubail hosts around 30 major industrial operators, and the facility is designed from the outset as a scalable platform for the broader cluster. Saudi Arabia's Investment Ministry reinforced that vision in late April 2026, signing a new agreement with SATORP to develop further downstream industries at Amiral. That program could unlock $4 billion in additional petrochemical investment and substantially expand future effluent volumes requiring treatment.

Commissioning is targeted for 2028. Before then, the technology stack will need to prove consistent performance across the full range of spent caustic and complex effluent chemistries the plant was engineered to manage. The financing is done. The building has started. Jubail is becoming the Gulf's new reference point for industrial water innovation.