Sharakat, the renamed Saudi Water Partnership Company, has set out a programme taking wastewater treatment capacity from 1.79 million to about 3.19 million cubic metres a day by 2031, alongside three independent transmission pipelines running a combined 1,596 kilometres inland. The pipes, storage and treatment plants are the half of the water system that determines whether desalinated output is usable.
Sharakat, the state company that procures Saudi Arabia's water assets from private developers, has published a seven-year statement setting out a programme in which treatment and long-distance transmission grow faster than the desalination capacity they exist to serve. Wastewater treatment capacity across the company's projects is projected to rise from about 1.79 million cubic metres a day to roughly 3.19 million by 2031, and three independent water transmission pipelines are now contracted or in procurement.
The company issued the statement under a name it adopted last month. The Saudi Water Partnership Company launched the Sharakat identity at the Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture in Riyadh on 13 February. The mandate is unchanged: tender water assets to private consortia on long-term build-own-operate-transfer terms, with the state buying the output.
Transmission is the newer part of that mandate and the more consequential one. Saudi desalination capacity sits on two coastlines. Demand sits increasingly inland, in Riyadh and Qassim, and a plant without a pipe to the population it serves produces water nobody can drink. The pipeline programme is an attempt to procure that link the same way the plants themselves were procured.
The first of the three, Rayis to Rabigh, runs 150 kilometres between the Madinah and Makkah regions and is designed to move 500,000 cubic metres a day of drinking water. It was let to a consortium led by Alkhorayef Water and Power Technologies under a 35-year build-own-operate-transfer contract worth about SR7.78bn, and reached financial close ahead of a commercial operation date targeted for the second quarter of this year.
The second, linking Jubail in the Eastern Province to Buraydah in Qassim, is considerably larger: 587 kilometres carrying up to 650,000 cubic metres a day, at a total cost of about SR8.5bn. A developer team of Aljomaih Energy and Water, Nesma Company and Buhur for Investment holds the contract, which has reached financial close, with construction expected to begin in the second quarter of this year.
The third and largest has not yet closed. Vision International Investment Company was named preferred bidder for the Riyadh-Qassim pipeline on a levelised transmission cost of SR2.627 per cubic metre. At roughly 859 kilometres and 685,000 cubic metres a day it would be the longest of the three, and its scope includes storage as well as pipe: six strategic reservoirs in Riyadh with a combined 1.02 million cubic metres, plus 32 operational tanks along the route holding a further 571,000 cubic metres. Commercial operation is targeted for the first quarter of 2030 under a 35-year term.
The storage element is the part most often overlooked. A city supplied by a single long pipeline from a coastal plant has no tolerance for an outage on that pipeline, and strategic reservoirs are the only way to convert a continuous supply into days of resilience. Building them into the transmission concession puts the cost and the availability obligation on the same project company that owns the pipe.
On the treatment side the programme is being delivered plant by plant around the largest urban areas. The Al-Haer independent sewage treatment plant south of Riyadh, at 200,000 cubic metres a day and a cost of about SR1.8bn, is due to begin commercial operation in the fourth quarter of this year; its scope includes a 32-kilometre treated-effluent transmission system rated for up to 400,000 cubic metres a day. The Riyadh East plant, sized at 200,000 cubic metres a day in a first phase and 400,000 in a second, is expected to be awarded this year, with a tender for a plant at Kharj anticipated later in 2026. Alongside the large plants sits a kingdom-wide programme for 123 small sewage treatment plants with combined capacity of roughly 492,650 cubic metres a day.
The reason treatment capacity is growing at close to twice the rate of the population it serves is that treated effluent has a second use. Water recovered from a sewage plant and piped to irrigation, landscaping or industrial cooling is water that does not have to be desalinated, transmitted inland and then discarded. The transmission line attached to the Al-Haer plant is sized for twice the plant's throughput precisely because reuse, not disposal, is the point of it.
None of this is finished. Two of the three transmission pipelines are in construction rather than operation, the third has a preferred bidder and no financial close, and most of the sewage capacity in the seven-year statement is still to be tendered. The government has set a target of more than SR240bn of private capital across its privatisation programme to 2030, and the water sector is among the larger contributors to it. What the statement establishes is the shape of the ask: fewer very large coastal plants than the headline capacity figures imply, and a great deal more pipe, pumping and treatment inland.