Qatar-Bahrain $4 Billion Causeway Hit By Delays Over Cost

An ambitious $4 billion plan to build the world's longest marine causeway linking Qatar and Bahrain faces delays due to protracted negotiations over its cost and design.

"It's taking more time," Jaber Ali Al Mohannadi, general manager of the Qatar Bahrain Causeway Foundation, or QBCF, which is in charge of building the giant bridge, told Zawya Dow Jones in a phone interview Tuesday. "We are negotiating the price and there are some technical and financial issues."

Work on the causeway was originally slated to finish in 2015 and cost around $4 billion, according to Zawya.com data. The project is jointly funded by the Qatari and Bahraini governments.

The structure will connect the West coast of gas-rich Qatar with the East coast of the tiny Persian Gulf archipelago of Bahrain and eventually form part of the planned Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC, rail network. It is aimed at improving transport and trade links between the two states.

Qatar and Bahrain, together with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman, form the GCC.

But the project, first announced in 2001, has been dogged by spiraling cost and delays partly due to the decision two years ago to add freight and passenger rail lines.

A consortium led by Vinci Construction Grands Projects in May 2008 signed the design-build contract for the causeway scheme but the main construction contract was never awarded.

The consortium also includes Germany's Hochtief AG, Consolidated Contractors International Co., or CCC, and Qatari Diar Real Estate. KBR Inc. (KBR) and U.K. engineering firm Halcrow also in 2008 won the two-phase contract for management planning and design oversight of the bridge.

"The planning contract was finished in 2008 but a construction contract was never awarded," a spokesman for Hochtief said.

Denmark-based COWI, the consultant on the giant bridge, also known as the Friendship Causeway, was ordered to "demobilize" by the contractors about a month ago but was not told why, a person familiar with the matter said.

Another person confirmed the team working on the project design was scaled down in the last few months but added this was because the design phase had been completed.

The delay comes amid rising political tensions between the two Gulf Arab neighbors in recent weeks after a Bahraini fisherman was wounded by Qatari coast guards in early May for allegedly straying into Qatari waters. Days later Qatar-owned broadcaster Al Jazeera's office was closed down in Bahrain.

"It's called the friendship bridge for a reason and it's supposed to be based on the idea of mutual friendship and respect and when that friendship and respect isn't going so well then obviously that affects the whole support for the idea," said Shadi Hamid, deputy director at think tank Brookings Doha Center, part of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, a division of the Washington-based Brookings Institution.