Owned by Abdul Latif Jameel Energy, the company has been established to “tackle the challenges of water scarcity and contamination”.
Focusing on the provision of global solutions that will contribute to sustainable development in the water sector, Almar will help construct and operate water desalination and purification treatment plants in areas that need them most.
That’s some of the problems we have to face over the next few years.
At the end, we see that the consequences will be felt by the 1.2 billion people living in what we call scarcity areas, while 1.6 billion people will be really affected at an economic level.” While this paints a fairly gloomy picture, Cosin is adamant that Almar will be able to help regional governments and utility providers over the coming years, backed as they are by Abdul Latif Jameel Energy’s resources and capabilities.
The cycles are different, but the overall business concept is the same.” “The strategy with Almar is to develop, finance, build and operate the plants, and after a reasonable period of time, when the production is stable, sell the assets – but keep the operation and maintenance of those assets.” Cosin adds that although government budgets have tightened, the private sector has started to show greater interest in the water generation industry.
This will be giving us a very good solution to develop a new way for infrastructure development,” he says.
No one is starting from scratch, creating solutions with governments and utility providers, and finding out what is the best way,” Cosin elaborates.
“One important point for us with Abdul Latif Jameel Energy is the long-term vision that they have.
These projects take two to three years to develop.
“We decided to create this new platform about 10 months ago, with the possibility to use this extension of FRV in the water sector, in the very parallel areas that the water business needs to be in, which is the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.” Keeping this vision in mind, Cosin and Arozamena outline how they built and developed a team with the necessary experience in developing projects in the municipal and industrial sectors, while also recruiting personnel with the knowledge and experience to extend the PPP model, so often used in the municipal sector, into the industrial sector.