Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction Co. has secured an $80 million deal to build a desalination plant in Saudi Arabia, the country’s leading power equipment maker announced Tuesday.

Under the deal with Marafiq, a state-run utility, Doosan will set up a plant to produce 54,000 tons of fresh water every day starting 2014. The output is sufficient to supply 150,000 residents of the Middle Eastern country’s second-largest city, the company said.

The contract is the latest in a series of orders Doosan has bagged to establish such facilities in the water-scarce nation. Its project for the world’s largest desalination factory is under way, aiming to create 68,000 tons of fresh water daily from August next year. The firm also won a 1.7 trillion won ($1.58 billion) deal last September.

The technology is widely embraced in the region where oil is a plenty but water supplies have been a thorny problem for decades.

Saudi Arabia accounts for about a quarter of the world’s desalination market, which was valued at nearly 50 billion liter per day, industry figures showed.

The Changwon-based company has been beefing up its shares in the burgeoning market by obtaining key technologies. Doosan said it is the only company in the world that has secured all three desalination methods ― multi-state flash, multi-effect distillation and reverse osmosis.

By Shin Hyon-hee (heeshin@heraldcorp.com)