Italian export credit agency (ECA) Sace is guaranteeing €125mn-worth of supply contracts for power station 5, part of the line 6 expansion project at the Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) plant.

Sace says the guarantee will support 40 Italian sub-contractors, mostly SMEs, specialised in machinery and components for the energy sector.

The main engineering procurement and construction (EPC) contractors for power station 5 are GE and Gama. Bechtel is the main contractor for the line 6 expansion project, while Siemens is the power distribution system contractor.

The GE-Gama consortium will provide gas turbines and the engineering and design services for the combined-cycle gas-fed power station.

JP Morgan, Gulf International Bank (GIB) and National Bank of Bahrain (NBB) are the financial advisors for the project.

Earlier this year, Alba secured US$700mn-worth of financing backed by German and Swiss ECAs Euler Hermes and Swiss Export Risk Insurance (Serv).

Last year, Alba successfully closed a US$1.5bn syndicated term-loan facility comprising two tranches; a conventional senior unsecured conventional term-loan facility of US$882mn and senior sharia-compliant facility of US$618mn.

Alba’s expansion project is one of the largest brownfield developments in the region. Expected to begin production by January 2019, with an estimated US$3bn of total investment, the plant will be the largest single-site smelter in the world. The expansion will boost the smelter’s per-annum production by 540,000 metric tonnes, tallying its total production capacity to 1.5 million metric tonnes a year.