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Milestones
SMELTER’S FIRST HOT METAL
ICELAND Alcoa’s Fjardaál smelter, built by Bechtel on Iceland’s east coast, produced its first aluminum in April. The 382,000-ton- (347,000-tonne-) per year facility, near Reyðarfjörður, is considered among the safest and most sustainable facilities of its type. The project earned Iceland’s highest environmental award, the Conch, for generating minimal landfill waste and discharging no polluted water during construction. More than 2,200 workers from Iceland, Poland, and other countries worked at the site. Alcoa expects Fjardaál to reach full production by the end of this year.
BNI CELEBRATES 30TH
USA Bechtel’s government services business unit is celebrating its 30th anniversary. One of Bechtel National’s earliest contracts was with the U.S. Department of Energy, to clean up radioactive contamination from the early years of the nation’s atomic energy program. Since then, the company has expanded into managing and operating government facilities—including the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories and other DOE and Department of Defense sites (including Savannah River Site, at left)—and has led projects in areas ranging from disaster cleanup to weapons demilitarization.
CLEANER COAL PLANT
USA Bechtel will build a 1,600-megawatt supercritical coal-fired power plant in southern Illinois for Peabody Energy Corp. and six equity partners. The $2.9 billion facility will use high-sulfur coal from a nearby mine, and will employ some of the most advanced pollution controls to minimize particulate and greenhouse gas emissions. Prairie State is one of the biggest private capital projects ever in southern Illinois.
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY AWARD
USA The College of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin has presented Bechtel with its Equal Opportunity in Engineering Corporate Partner of the Year Award. The award recognizes companies for supporting the school’s recruitment, internship, academic, and professional development efforts, and for encouraging employees to serve as advisors and role models for future engineers. Bechtel Foundation supports the university’s Equal Opportunity in Engineering program.
SAFETY FIRST
LATEST SAFETY MILESTONES Bechtel’s ASAB Gas Development project team in Abu Dhabi has completed 2.4 million job hours without a lost-time injury. The Kwajalein Missile Range project in the Marshall Islands recently completed 3.8 million accident-free hours. Bechtel’s project team at the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment project in Idaho has completed 3.7 million hours without a lost-time accident. Other notable safety achievements include 7.9 million hours at the Jubail Industrial project in Saudi Arabia; 5.7 million hours at the Autostrada Transilvania project in Romania; 2.7 million accident-free hours at the Sabine Pass LNG project in Louisiana; 4.9 million hours at the Onshore Gas Development Phase III project in Abu Dhabi; and 1.3 million hours at the Motiva refinery expansion project in Texas.
ALUMINA REFINERY EXPANSION
AUSTRALIA Bechtel will provide engineering, procurement, and construction management for a $1.8 billion expansion of Rio Tinto’s Yarwun alumina refinery in Queensland, Australia. The expansion will more than double production. Bechtel will also build a gas-fired cogeneration plant at the site to provide steam for the refinery and electricity to the country’s power grid. Work has begun on the three-year project, which will be complete in late 2010.
NUCLEAR PROJECT
USA Bechtel will perform construction management for a steam generator replacement at Progress Energy’s Crystal River Unit 3 in Crystal River, Florida. The project team will spend approximately two years preparing for a 74-day replacement outage in late 2009. The 838-megawatt Crystal River plant went online in 1977.
CHEMICAL WEAPONS ELIMINATION
USA Bechtel is constructing two U.S. Department of Defense chemical weapons neutralization facilities—one at the Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado and one at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky. Bechtel is designing, building, and will operate facilities where the weapons will be neutralized, and then dismantling the facilities and restoring the sites for other purposes. The company completed a similar project last year at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.
MANAGEMENT MOVES
Bill Dudley has been elected executive vice president of Bechtel Group, Inc. Jim Jackson is now president of Bechtel’s Oil, Gas & Chemicals business unit. Ian Copeland is now president of Fossil Power and has been elected senior vice president of Bechtel Corporation. Other new SVPs are Bob Casamento, Rick Jackson, and Brian Sedar.
CLOSER
Of Speed and Steam
Steam generators are central to nuclear power plants, collecting heat from reactor cores to drive energy-producing turbines. Like most equipment, though, steam generators wear out and have to be replaced in order to maintain full power and operate safely.
Over the last 20 years, there have been 20 replacement projects in the United States, with eight more anticipated by 2012. Bechtel has overseen many of them, setting records for the lowest radiation exposure and best employee safety, and often completing the replacements in record time. In fact, Bechtel has completed three of the world’s four fastest replacements, two in the last year—at the Beaver Valley plant in Pennsylvania, and Texas’ Comanche Peak facility, where the job was completed in 55 days, beating the world record by over a week.
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