Front End

Exceedingly Green

Along with China’s rapid economic growth has come increasing awareness of the need for energy conservation and environmental protection in new structures. Take, for example, two buildings recently completed for headset maker Plantronics, in China’s Suzhou Industrial Park, near Shanghai.


Designed and constructed by Bechtel to meet Plantronics’ vision for a “green” campus setting, the buildings are the first of their type in China to earn Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. LEED rates buildings on their success in addressing issues like sustainable site development, energy and water efficiency, materials, and indoor environmental quality.

Bechtel also worked with Plantronics to include cross-cultural and people-sensitive elements in the design. On the buildings’ campus are a tai-chi area, indoor and out-door dining and exercise areas, and water features—in a courtyard based on the historic gardens of Suzhou.

The project was completed under budget and ahead of schedule, in time for China’s Lunar New Year.

Testing, Testing

Bechtel Telecommunications’ training, demonstration, and research laboratory in Frederick, Maryland, offers customers tools and assistance for designing and planning their networks and testing new technologies and equipment. This fall, the lab will host North America’s first “Plugfest.”

Plugfest, sponsored by the nonprofit WiMAX Forum, gives telecommunications equipment manufacturers a chance to test how well their products work together for long-range, high-speed wireless networking. Bechtel engineers and technicians will put together test configurations, then record and analyze the results for more than 15 WiMAX member companies. While Bechtel is both technology and vendor “neutral,” Plugfest gives the company an opportunity to demonstrate engineering capabilities to a new group of potential customers.

High-speed Connection

With employees at dozens of job sites across the United States, Bechtel Telecoms maintains a workforce ready to mobilize on short notice. The company recently changed strategies to staff these jobs. Instead of subcontracting work to other companies, Bechtel Telecoms is directly hiring hundreds of tower climbers, electricians, and other workers. In just one year, Bechtel became one of the three largest direct-hire employers among some 1,400 such companies in North America.

The changeover allows for more efficient scheduling, better employee quality and safety training, lower customer costs, and faster response time. For everyday projects—and emergencies—fast-paced telecommunications customers look for contractors that can move in, mobilize, and start to work. In a dramatic example of its capabilities, Bechtel employees arrived from nearby states within just hours after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to repair a customer’s ravaged telecommunications network.

Hale Fellows Well Met

In a first-of-its-kind meeting earlier this year, Bechtel Fellows and senior technical leaders from DuPont, Intel, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, Westinghouse Electric, Boeing, and other organizations put their heads together at Bechtel’s San Francisco office to discuss research and programs they oversee.

It’s a good—and overdue—idea. And while these top thinkers drive the technical direction of giant companies, their influence need not be limited by the boundaries of a corporate campus. For their next meeting, scheduled for November in Seattle, they’ve agreed to explore a wide range of mutually beneficial topics. On the docket: knowledge-sharing between companies; intellectual property issues; and, especially, how to work better with universities to produce engineering graduates who can most effectively contribute to industry.

Beach-bound Birds

Under its contract for the $5 billion New Doha International Airport in Qatar, Bechtel had to complete a massive environmental cleanup before beginning construction. Portions of the coastal airport site had been used for 30 years as a dump for Doha’s household and commercial waste, and some of it had begun to decompose, leaching polluting metals and chemicals into the Persian Gulf. Bechtel had to safely excavate 6.5 million cubic meters of waste, design and build a new environmentally controlled landfill inland, and construct a 40-kilometer haul road that bypasses populated areas.

More than 250,000 truckloads of garbage have been moved to the newly completed landfill. Meanwhile, flamingos and other wading birds are rediscovering the breeding and feeding wonders of the wetlands near the former dump site.

Local Emphasis

In July, 150 trainee employees began training in many of the craft disciplines that will soon be required on an aluminum smelter project that Bechtel is building for Sohar Aluminium in Oman.

Subsidized by Oman’s Ministry of Manpower, the training program is part of the project’s commitment to Omanization, which will help ensure that this Arab Gulf country can build on opportunities like the smelter to develop a lasting local population of trained construction workers.

The trainees will spend four to six months learning carpentry, masonry, machinery operation, electrical, and other construction skills. They’ll also receive instruction in work ethics and Bechtel’s safety culture.

At the same time, in another facet of the “Omanization” effort, the project has so far awarded more than $130 million of smelter-related business to Omani companies, ranging from providing concrete and steel to provisioning the on-site employee camp with food and furnishings.

Hybrids—A Whole Different Animal

With the price of gas skyrocketing and the fleet for a U.S. wireless project logging more than 17 million kilometers last year, a Bechtel Six Sigma team looked into hybrid cars to trim costs. The team compared its existing fuel and rental costs with the cost of replacing fleet cars with Toyota Prius and Ford Escape hybrids.

While the leasing costs were the same, hybrids—which combine a gas engine with an electric motor and a powerful battery—can travel up to 800 kilometers on each tank of fuel. That meant Bechtel could significantly reduce the project’s transportation cost with a switchover.

The result: Bechtel has replaced 100 of the project’s 550 vehicles with leased gas-electric hybrids, and plans to add more as soon as they’re available.

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