Milestones

Awards · Announcements · Appointments

ALUMINA PLANT EXPANSION

AUSTRALIA Worsley Alumina Pty. Ltd. has awarded Bechtel a contract covering a $670 million expansion of its alumina refinery and bauxite mine at Collie, Western Australia. Bechtel will perform a feasibility study, followed by engineering, procurement, and construction management. The expansion will increase production from 3.5 million tonnes per year to 4.3 million tonnes per year and improve the plant’s environmental performance.

STEAM GENERATOR REPLACEMENTS

UNITED STATES Bechtel has replaced two steam generators at Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona. The work, on the station’s Unit 1, was completed ahead of schedule, in support of a plant outage three days shorter than the same replacement performed for Unit 2 in 2003. Measuring 24 meters long and seven meters in diameter, the new 726-tonne generators—the largest of their kind—barely fit through the containment building’s equipment hatch. Bechtel will replace two more generators in Unit 3 in 2007.

IRAQ POWER PLANT COMPLETED

IRAQ Bechtel has completed installation and startup of a 260-megawatt generator at a power substation near Kirkuk, for Iraq’s Ministry of Electricity. The unit joins another Bechtel-installed generator at the substation, for a total rated capacity of 325 megawatts—enough for 325,000 households. A caravan of heavy moving equipment led by a military escort transported the unit 1,030 kilometers in 12 days last year.


WASTE SHIPMENT COMPLETED

UNITED STATES Bechtel has completed shipment of 1,860 drums of transuranic waste from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nevada Test Site to permanent disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico. Bechtel sorted and characterized the waste—byproducts of nuclear weapons research and development—into the drums over a period of eight years, then prepared the drums for shipments throughout 2004 and 2005.

AFCAP III AWARD

UNITED STATES The Air Force has awarded Bechtel a 10-year task order contract to provide engineering, construction, and support services to the Defense Department and other federal agencies on missions around the world. Bechtel will support military forces and others during natural disaster and humanitarian response efforts, noncombat operations, and the war on terrorism.

SAFETY FIRST

STELLAR SAFETY RECORDS In Australia, Bechtel’s team building an alumina refinery for Comalco completed 1.5 million job hours without a lost-time accident. In Chile, a Bechtel joint venture completed Codelco’s Planta de Tratamiento de Minerales en Pila copper mine expansion, after 4 million accident-free hours. Other notable safety achievements included 1.6 million accident-free hours at the Sakhalin Island onshore gas processing facility in Russia; 1.3 million hours at the Mountainview power project in California; 4.6 million hours at the Kwajalein Range Services project in the Marshall Islands; and, in Saudi Arabia: 7.2 million hours at the Jubail industrial project and 1.6 million hours at the Khursaniyah gas plant.

AFFILIATED COMPANIES Senimdi Kurylsis, a Kazakh company owned by a Bechtel joint venture with Turkish partner Enka, has completed 22.9 million job hours without a lost-time accident on four oil and gas projects in Kazakhstan.

MANAGEMENT MOVES

Mary Moreton, corporate manager of Human Resources, and Jim Illich, project director of the Equatorial Guinea liquefied natural gas project, have been elected senior vice presidents. Senior Vice President Jim Haynes has been named president of the company’s Mining & Metals business. Senior Vice President John Mitchell has been named principal deputy lab director at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

LONDON RAIL LINE

UNITED KINGDOM Cross London Rail Links Ltd. has selected Bechtel as development manager for its proposed Crossrail project. The regional rail line would involve construction of 22.5 kilometers of twin-bored tunnels and associated subsurface stations under the central city, to connect with surface railway east and west of London. Under the current contract, Bechtel will develop the program until design and construction contracts are tendered, in about two years. If Crossrail gets final approval, it would be one of Europe’s largest-ever infrastructure projects.

CHEMICAL AGENT REMOVAL COMPLETED

UNITED STATES Working on an accelerated schedule following September 11, 2001, Bechtel has completed a six-year project to neutralize and remove deadly mustard agent from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. The completion makes Aberdeen the first former chemical weapons facility in the continental United States to completely remove mustard agent from its premises. Mustard agent was first used in World War I, but is now outlawed worldwide.

CLOSER

Whirlwind Recovery More than 95,000 people in Mississippi now live in temporary housing readied for occupancy by Bechtel as part of FEMA's Hurricane Katrina relief program. In just six months, Bechtel "hauled and installed" more than 35,000 housing units, a process that included finding sites, completing environmental assessments, and obtaining permits. Along the way, the project recorded 2.5 million job hours without a lost-time accident, despite 12-hour work days, seven days a week, under sometimes hazardous conditions. FEMA called Bechtel's performance "a remarkable success." In the process, Bechtel employed more than 2,000 local people. More than 65 percent of its subcontracts—$200 million worth—went to local firms, and over 80 percent of those awards went to small businesses, including many veteran-, women-, and minority-owned enterprises.

 


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