The central chilled water system servicing one of the academic buildings in King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM) campus located in Dhahran is numerically modeled in detail with a special focus on the pumping scheme. The software Engineering Equation Solver (EES) is used for the modeling and simulation of the system. The bin data along with the weather profile is utilized to calculate the annual energy consumption of the system for three cities in Saudi Arabia. It is found for Dhahran that by replacing the existing single loop constant pumping scheme by the constant primary and variable secondary scheme, an 8% saving in the total annual energy consumption is achieved, which is increased to 13% by adopting the single loop variable primary scheme. Similarly, for the climatic conditions of Riyadh and Jeddah reductions in annual energy consumption by approximately 7% are obtained by adopting the constant primary and variable secondary scheme. However, if the single loop variable pumping scheme is adopted, the energy savings for Riyadh and Jeddah increases to 12% and 11%, respectively. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.