Egypt’s property developer Administrative Capital for Urban Development (ACUD) has inked a deal with the Egypt’s Petroleum Ministry to establish the first cooling district in the New Administrative Capital (NAC), with the project’s first phase to be implemented with investments valued at EGP 2.5 bn, Invest-Gate reports.

ACUD Chairman Ahmed Zaki Abdeen said that the project is the biggest in Egypt and is considered a quantitative technological leap in the history of the north African country; “it is the largest in Egypt and Africa.”

He unveiled that the Egyptian Company for Energy and Cooling Projects (Gascool) will implement the first phase and will depend on local factories to complete the implementation works.

“ACUD insists to establish and maintain the project by an Egyptian company. As well as, we try as much as we can to have all the project’s inputs of a local component,” the chairman was quoted as saying.

According to Abdeen, the cooling district is designed to keep pace with the latest standards of global stations, depending on storage of the energy system at night for use during peak periods, which provides additional savings in power by 20%. In addition, the stations has a capacity of 120,000 tons per year and will be developed over two phases.

Commenting on the news, Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Tarek El Molla underlined that this project is one of the value-added projects for the use of natural gas as part of the ministry’s strategy to expand the use of gas in homes, factories, and petrochemicals.