Hyundai E&C makes inroads into Colombian construction market

Hyundai E&C received a 350-million-dollar deal to build the Colombia Bello Wastewater Treatment Plant about two years after the builder founded its branch in Bogota, Colombia, in 2010 in an effort to tap into new markets. The achievement is all the more meaningful in that Korea’s primary builder reentered the Central and South American market 12 years after it obtained the Porto Velho Combined Cycle Power Plant project in Brazil in 2000.

Colombia is rich in water resources. However, they are less available and the national wastewater treatment system is not capable of managing water quality. To deal with these, Empresas Publicas de Medellin (EPM) awarded the contract designed to treat wastewater dumped in the Aburra Valley and purify the water quality of the Medellin River.

The key of the project was to construct wastewater treatment facilities (such as a pretreatment system, a water treatment system, a sludge digestion system and an energy recovery system), an operation building and a public park for local residents.

The construction project began in September 2012 and was completed at the end of June 2019.

The Bello Wastewater Treatment Plant comprises of cutting-edge technology-intensive, environment-friendly facilities. Above all things, the energy recycling system converts methane and other biogases, generated during the process of sewage sludge digestion, into power by making use of power generators. The produced power accounts for 30 percent of the total amount of power consumed for the Bello Wastewater Treatment Plant.

The construction site put its all-out efforts to build six digesters which can minimize the volume of sludge. To reduce possible construction errors in building egg-shaped digesters 15 to 30 millimeters thick, 23 meters wide and 38 meters high, the construction site numbered each steel plate and applied machining and bending processes for steel plate cutting.

In an aim to reduce the construction period, the construction site adopted automatic welding of two steel plates, two meters wide and 15 meters long for each, and then utilized a 200-ton crane to install it. Technicians manually welded where the automatic welding cannot be adopted. Because approximately the half of welding works were covered by the automatic welding, the construction site could secure excellent construction quality and cut down on the construction period by three months.

Moreover, the construction site overhauled the image of a sewage treatment plant considered a NIMBY (not in my backyard) facility. It transformed the wastewater treatment plant site into a public park for the local residents by building a rest area and an observatory on the 429,752-square meter site. This contributed to developing the building estate in the neighboring area and apartment complexes, leading to greatly expanding the local economy.