Doha Bank has signed a project finance deal with Leighton Contracting Qatar, a subsidiary of UAE-based Habtoor Leighton Group, for the construction of a water reservoir project valued at $604.1 million (QR2.2bn).

The financing agreement will support the construction of the Qatar General Electricity & Water Corporation’s (Kahramaa) Water Security Mega Reservoirs Project at Rawdat Rashed.

The reservoirs, with a capacity of 100 million gallons each, will be the world’s largest reinforced concrete reservoirs, according to a company statement.

“We are pleased at the opportunity to participate in a project that will form the bedrock upon which Qatar’s water security initiatives will be built,” said Dr R. Seetharaman, Group CEO of Doha Bank. The bank has already issued project-related guarantees, he added.

The Water Security Mega Reservoirs Project was launched in response to a huge increase in the demand for potable water in Qatar. It aims to provide seven days of strategic water storage within Kahramaa’s network, covering the new mega reservoirs as well as the existing and future secondary reservoirs.

According to Kahramaa, the project entails construction of five potable water mega reservoirs sites and an interconnecting network of large-diameter water pipelines. Each reservoir site will contain up to nine reservoirs.

The first phase of the project, which is currently under implementation, will deliver a storage capacity of about 2,300 million gallons of water in 24 concrete reservoirs, and some 480km of buried ductile iron pipelines up to 1.6m in diameter. Meanwhile, the second stage of the project, to be implemented after 2020, will include construction of additional pipelines and 16 new reservoirs within the 5 mega sites, in order to achieve an ultimate total storage capacity of about 3,800 million gallons of water.