Qatar Cool opens world’s largest plant

The Qatar District Cooling Company, known as Qatar Cool, is behind the largest district cooling plant in the world. The plant, located at UDC’s iconic multibillion-dollar offshore development The Pearl-Qatar, has a capacity of 130,000 tons and serves around 40,000 residents through a 55-mile network of underground piping. The company also has two other plants connected to 17 miles of pipes under West Bay, the financial district of Doha, serving 47 high-rises.

“This is the first time this has been done in Qatar,” says Fayad Al Khatib, CEO of Qatar Cool. “We have been very fortunate to share technologies with other providers and technology developers all over the world, which enabled us to develop projects over the scale we do. We face a unique challenge here as we have to develop larger-scale projects compared to other parts of the world.”

District cooling provides chilled water from a cooling plant through a network of pipes to multiple residential, industrial and commercial buildings for air conditioning use. Compared to conventional cooling systems, district cooling uses 40% to 60% less energy. “We save about 250 million tons of carbon dioxide a year,” says Mr. Al Khatib. “The equivalent of trees planted out of our energy saving are about 35 million trees annually.”

Qatar Cool won two industry awards in the U.S. at the International District Energy Association (IDEA) conference last year for its energy saving efforts.

“We are setting benchmarks in terms of approaching solutions,” says the CEO.

“We are gaining a lot of experience locally and as a result we can be a major exporter of technology and know-how in the future.”