Hyundai Heavy Industries has completed the construction of massive power and desalination plants in Al-Dur, Bahrain, company officials said on Tuesday.

Hyundai Heavy executives and King Hamad Bin Issa Al Khalifa of Bahrain attended a ceremony on Monday to celebrate the completion of the project worth about $1.7 billion, they said.

Bahrain’s new power and desalination plants are gas-fired combined-cycle units and can generate up to 1,245 mega watts of power, capable of supplying 40 percent of Bahrain’s total electricity. The plants also can desalinate 218,000 cubic meters of water, accounting for 12 percent of the nation’s total desalination operations.

Hyundai Heavy’s chief director of the industrial plant division Chun In-soo said, “We expect that our successful work on the Al-Dur plants will have positive effects on winning orders from other countries in the Middle East.”

The Korean company is currently building two gas-fired combined-cycle power plants, one for 1,750 mega watts in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the other for 2,000 mega watts in Sabiya, Kuwait, which are worth about $5 billion combined.

Located in the Persian Gulf, Bahrain consists of 34 islands populated by about one million Bahraini and foreigners, with English and Arabic as the official languages.

By Chung Joo-won (joowonc@heraldcorp.com)