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Egypt's Orascom Construction inks $363 million power deal with Iraq Industrial giant will complete work on a plant in Baiji, northern Iraq over the next 21 months, say officials in Baghdad
Egypt's Orascom Construction Industries has signed a $363 million deal with Iraq's electricity ministry to build a 1,014 megawatt gas power plant in northern Iraq, government officials said on Thursday. The contract involves building a plant in Baiji, 180 km north of Baghdad, to install six gas units, each with a capacity of 169 MW, which Iraq bought from Siemens in 2008. The project is expected to be completed within 21 months, officials have said. Nearly nine years since the U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein, Iraq's national grid still supplies only a few hours of power each day. Intermittent electricity is one of the public's top complaints. Iraq plans to boost the grid's capacity by about 1,500 megawatts in the next few months and to add 22,000 MW of production capacity across Iraq, except for the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan, by the end of 2015, the electricity minister has said. Iraq's power availability has ranged between 7,000-8,000 megawatts but is due to increase to 9,000-9,500 MW this summer as some power projects come online and others are upgraded. Iraqi demand for electricity peaked at 15,000 megawatts last year, but the oil-producing nation managed to supply less than half of that. Shares in OCI, Egypt's largest-listed company, are trading 0.65 percent up at LE260 apiece on the country's exchange just before the close of Thursday's session.
