Front End

Sweet Water Returns

With the rehabilitation of the vital Sweet Water Canal, Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources can deliver more and purer water to the 1.75 million people around Basrah. The project, completed in December, is another milestone for Bechtel National under a contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The poorly maintained 240-kilometer waterway has been the primary source of fresh water for the city since 1996, but it had become clogged with sediment and was plagued by broken equipment. Bechtel dredged the canal, refurbished two pumping stations and 14 treatment plants, and repaired the station that pumps water from the canal’s reservoir to residential, commercial, and agricultural users. Bechtel also trained local plant managers to ensure proper long-term maintenance.
 

Train Tracking

With so much complex interaction between trade workers and contractors at London’s St. Pancras Station, Channel Tunnel Rail Link project managers needed a way to foresee schedule conflicts early in the process, sometimes months ahead.

So Bechtel experts developed a custom process called Stageworks. Stageworks combines the planned work sequences from all contractors and trades on the site, and builds a four-dimensional graphic visualization—a “clash report.” The report highlights conflicts between different contractors planning different activities at the same time and in the same locations. And it’s much easier to comprehend than traditional printed schedules.

Project managers find that Stageworks is highly flexible and can be used to track and manage work on many levels of detail. The planning tool recently helped the Bechtel’s IS&T team win the CIFE/CDI Process Innovation Award for Exceptional Building Project Value 2004, cosponsored by Stanford and Harvard universities.

Academic Challenge

For years, Bechtel has recruited top talent from engineering programs at major universities. Now, in addition to holding job fairs and campus interviews, the company is cosponsoring a Michigan Technology University program in which some of its engineering employees put real-world challenges to student teams. This year’s challenge: Find a way to detect an energized radio frequency cable—a potential safety hazard.

Bechtel mentors provide coaching by phone and e-mail and will be on campus when the teams present their solutions. It’s an opportunity to evaluate potential employees and assess their teamwork and communications skills as well as their awareness of real-life business challenges, like managing costs and schedules. Meanwhile, the students get a firsthand look at what life might be like on a Bechtel project.

Last year, Bechtel hired two new construction field engineers out of the program, based in part on how they met the 2004 challenge.

Clean-Coal Goal

Energy experts have long sought environmentally friendly, affordable ways to generate power from coal, the world’s most abundant fossil fuel. Over the past two decades, GE Energy has brought the goal closer to reality with refinements in its Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle technology.

IGCC combines gasification, which blends coal with oxygen to create a clean-burning gas, with combined-cycle technology, which efficiently reuses exhaust heat to help spin a plant’s turbines. IGCC plants require 15 percent less fuel and exceed the environmental and power output performance of traditional coal-fired generating units. And they can be used on almost any project where low-cost feedstocks like coal, heavy oils, and coke are readily available.

Bechtel has worked alongside GE in the forefront of IGCC technology since GE pioneered it in 1984 on the 100-megawatt Cool Water plant in Barstow, California. Now the two companies have formed an alliance to address the challenges that remain. The goal is to design standardized IGCC power plants with lower capital costs. Bechtel is currently developing a 600-megawatt plant design that is expected to drive down the cost, shorten schedules, and improve the reliability of future projects.

Turtle Hurdle Overcome

The Barrows nesting turtle leaves the sea only to lay about 100 eggs in the beaches on Barrow Island, off the west coast of Australia. Later, the hatchlings head for the sea, guided by the effervescent wave action.

Light from a planned liquefied natural gas facility on the island might have confused the baby turtles, causing them to lose their way. So Bechtel is using state-of-the-art modeling software to help the infants survive. The software computes and illustrates the distribution of artificial light from all sources. It enabled Bechtel to develop a lighting scheme for the facility that will prevent spillover light from reaching the beach. The hatchlings will see only light from the water, following it in their race to the safety of the ocean, instead of toward the LNG plant and certain death from scavenger birds.

Tube Timing

Tube Timing London’s famed Underground is a 358-kilometer network of crisscrossing track, with hundreds of trains running at the same time. Speed and safety are always paramount for the Tube’s operators.

In October, Bechtel, as part of the Tube Lines consortium that’s upgrading the Piccadilly, Northern, and Jubilee lines, announced successful testing of a new signaling system to replace existing equipment, some of which dates to World War II.

With the help of onboard antennas, each train’s position is constantly pinpointed by electronic monitors that tell trains when to go, stop, and slow down, in coordination with others. The system will allow the three Underground lines to run far more trains safely during peak hours, increasing capacity by more than 400,000 passengers per day.


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