Through its support to the Electricity & Water Authority, Black & Veatch established a long-term strategy and plan for the sustainable development, management and conservation of water resources in the Kingdom of Bahrain.

It has been the responsibility of the Electricity & Water Authority to serve the Kingdom’s energy and water needs. This includes the total electrical and water infrastructure, from the production facilities to the transmission and distribution networks. The 15-year Water & Electricity Master Plan helps the Authority to guide and implement the projects needed to ensure the region’s demands for these resources can be met over the long term.

Black & Veatch, in joint venture with SNC-Lavalin, was awarded the contract to update the Master Plan for the 2006-2020 period. Black & Veatch’s role was for master planning of the water supply. The study was to the year 2020, with intermediate horizons, and covered the entire Kingdom of Bahrain.

The scope of work included planning, technical, economic, sociological, hydrological and water resources studies. The Master Plan also took account of leakage reduction programmes, water conservation measures, and strategies to deal with emergencies such as plant outages and transmission failures. Black & Veatch used a network model of the transmission system to hydraulically optimise the system and to predict the chemical properties of waters blended from different desalinated water and groundwater sources.

Aside from Black & Veatch’s core team, the project drew on the company’s global resources. These included specialists in the fields of desalination technologies, leakage reduction, network modelling, water treatment, hydrogeology and information technology. In addition, an environmental review was carried out to identify the impacts of the new water supply proposals, along with any necessary mitigation measures.