South Korea’s Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction Co. won an $850 million order to build coal-fired thermal power plants in the Philippines less than a week after it inked a 1 trillion won ($881 million) deal to construct a combined heat and power plant in Saudi Arabia.

Doosan Heavy said on Thursday that it won an $850 million order from Redondo Peninsula Energy Inc., a private energy firm in the Philippines, to build two 300 megawatt coal-fired thermal power plants in the Southeast Asian country. The contract is based on an engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) agreement where it oversees full construction process from planning, materials manufacturing, installing, and trial operations.

Construction of the first power plant will begin this year with completion due in December 2020 while that of the second plant will begin next year. Both thermal plants will be located in a region 130 kilometers northwest of the Philippines’ capital Manila.

The company will also, for the first time, incorporate the so-called circulating fluidized bed (CFB) technology, an environmentally-friendly thermal power facility that reduces pollutant emissions such as nitrogen and sulfur oxides and saves fuel costs, in building the two power plants since it obtained the technology from its German subsidiary Doosan Lentjes GmbH that it acquired in 2011. Currently, only a few global energy firms such as Foster Wheeler AG and Alstom are capable of building boilers with 300 megawatt and higher power by using CFB technology. Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction will be the first Korean company to implement the technology.

Kim Hun-tak, head of EPC business group at Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction, said that the company expects the latest power plant project in the Philippines would prove synergies from the 2011 acquisition of the German subsidiary.

By Kim Jung-hwan

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