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Japanese trading giant Marubeni Corporation has made its third offer in as many years to help build Jakarta’s Mass Rapid Transit rail line, Governor Fauzi Bowo said on Tuesday.

After meeting with Teruo Asada, Marubeni’s president and chairman of the Japan-Indonesia Economic Committee, Fauzi said the company would have the opportunity to participate in the project once it got under way in 2012, but would have to go through a public tender process.

“I welcome their offer to take part in the project,” he said. “Once the tender is open, they will have the chance to register, but they must meet the requirements.”

Marubeni was previously involved in the construction of MRT networks in Caracas, Manila and Taipei, among other cities.

Fauzi said he had received similar offers from other major companies, adding that he hoped the crowded field would result in the lowest cost for the project once the tender process was complete.

Sutanto Suhodho, the governor’s deputy for transportation, trade and industry, said that while Marubeni had allocated substantial funding for projects in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, it would have to take part in the public tender along with all other companies seeking to participate in the MRT project.

“It’s not just Marubeni that has expressed interest,” he said. “We’ve also heard from Mitsubishi and from companies from Germany. They’ve all got to go through the same tender process.”

In the meeting, Marubeni also offered to invest in power generation and water management projects in the capital.

“They’ve got a lot of experience in desalination plants,” Fauzi said. “There’s a desalination pilot project being run now by Ancol [in North Jakarta], and if the results are positive, we could build on it as an alternative source of clean drinking water for the city.”

He added that in the field of power generation, Marubeni had offered to invest in a new plant with state-owned utility Perusahaan Listrik Negara to meet the city’s capacity shortfall of 150 megawatts.

However, he said his administration was looking for a longer-term solution by building its own power plant, independent of PLN, in the special economic zone planned for Marunda in North Jakarta.

In a separate development, the Jakarta Transportation Office announced it would try to utilize abandoned monorail pillars in the building of elevated roads for new TransJakarta busway corridors. Corridors XIII, XIV and XV are all expected to have elevated sections running over busy junctions and stretches of road.

Udar Pristono, head of the office, said using the existing pillars would help to save costs.

“All three routes will need elevated sections, so we’ve proposed that they make use of the monorail pillars in South and Central Jakarta as well as existing elevated road sections that aren’t being used,” he said on Tuesday.

Sutanto added that building elevated busway routes was the only viable way to ensure the routes were completed quickly with minimal disruption to regular traffic.

“The only options are to acquire more land for the new routes or elevate them, but freeing up land is always complicated and could turn out to be the more expensive option,” he said.

Construction of the three routes is not expected to begin until after 2012.