With desalination in Spain an important strategy amid ongoing water shortages partially linked to climate change, a plant in Torrevieja—a coastal Mediterranean city in the country's southeast—plans to boost its output of desalinated water by 50%.

State-owned water company Acuamed awarded this summer a $93.9-million contract to a JV of Sacyr Water, Sacyr Construction, Ferrovial water unit Cadagua and Ferrovial Construction to expand plant capacity to 120 cubic hectometers per year from its current 80 cu hm per year. The contract also covers four years of operation and maintenance by the JV.

Work includes construction of a roughly 5,000-sq-m warehouse with an electrical room that will hold new osmosis equipment and five new racks of energy recovery and pressure exchanger isobaric chambers for seawater energy capture.

Two seawater catchment systems will be added, which, along with increased pumping capacity, will double seawater collection and pumping. The current plant, built and operated by Acciona, is Europe's largest, according to Sacyr. A Sacyr-Ferrovial JV was also awarded a contract last month to expand and operate the Águilas desalination plant in the Murcia region of Spain.

The region served by the plant, which includes the province of Alicante, is “one of the areas with the most variable climate and lowest availability of water resources in Spain,” but with an economy based on agriculture and tourism, says Acuamed, which is responsible for the country's hydraulic infrastructure. Water produced by the plant is split between crop irrigation and supplementing supply for up to 1.6 million people.