After having the world’s largest gas-fired power plants completed in the country this year, Egypt has now set its sights on building the world’s largest coal-fired power plant. A consortium of China’s Shanghai Electric and Dongfang Electric Cooperation, and Egypt’s Hassan Allam Construction has been awarded the contract to build a 6 GW plant at Hamrawein, on the Red Sea, 600 km south east of Cairo. Rival bids came from consortiums led by Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems and by General Electric. The winning bid was priced at US$4.4 billion (€3.84 billion), while the GE-led bid was priced at around 32% higher, at US$5.8 billion (€5.06 billion). Zou Lei, chairman of Dongfang Electric said the plant will be “the world’s most advanced ultra-supercritical clean-coal plant,” though more detail is not available at present. A construction period of six to seven years is envisaged. One interesting aspect of the project is that it will mean that Egypt will have to import coal to run the plant, not having domestic resources of its own, and it was only in 2014 that the Egyptian government lifted a ban on importing the fuel, making the Hamrawein project possible. The cajnews report on the project quoted Prof. Rosemary Falcon of Wits University as saying that “we can now burn [coal] with close to zero emission and I look forward to following the project in Egypt.”