Technology Examples

Cutting-edge technology plays a key role in our diverse global business. Here are a few examples of technological innovations that Bechtel has used to help ensure success for its projects and customers.

Capturing carbon

Concerns about global warming and climate change are leading power producers to consider new ways of reducing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from their fossil fuel-fired plants. While many Bechtel customers already employ advanced systems that generate less CO2, they’re also investigating technologies that capture the CO2 and put it to productive and profitable use.

One such technology is called CO2 capture and sequestration. In this cutting-edge process, CO2 is recovered from a power plant’s flue gas and injected into a nearby depleted oil field. The pressurized CO2 forces otherwise unrecoverable oil from the well, while the CO2 remains sequestrated underground.

Bechtel, working with a Canadian CO2 capture process licensor, has presented a plan to the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate to use CO2 captured from a 420-megawatt combined cycle power plant currently under construction for sequestration near an oil field in Kårstø, Norway. It would be the world’s first utility-sized CO2 capture plant of its kind.

A New Reality 

On a big Mideast airport project, the customer got to tour the passenger terminal before it was built. In the UK, computerized simulations help determine where to place interactive train signaling on a busy rail line. At the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, engineers designed a permanent shell for the failed reactor without having to get near it.

In each case, Bechtel used virtual reality—animated, three-dimensional walkthroughs akin to sophisticated video games (except without the car wrecks and shooting)—to show in advance what completed projects look like and how they work. Since its creation in 1995, the company’s Virtual Reality Lab has created virtual worlds for a wide range of projects, including liquefied natural gas plants, airports, bridges, and rail systems. Virtual reality walkthroughs can speed up the design process, confirm engineering decisions, and even reveal design flaws that can be fixed before construction begins.

They also reassure customers that a project will meet expectations. 

Attention to Prevention 

When reports surfaced that swans in the former Soviet republic of Georgia may have died of “bird flu,” workers from a recently opened public health facility in Tbilisi jumped into action. Using modern specimen collection equipment aboard their new outbreak response vehicles, they rushed samples to the Tbilisi lab, where they confirmed that the birds died of H5N1, a virus subtype that could cause a pandemic.

Officials applauded the rapid response, which could have taken far longer if not for the lab’s timely completion last year. The vehicles, training for the lab workers, and design and construction of the lab itself were all funded by a U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency contract with Bechtel. Under the same agreement, Bechtel has completed two similar labs in Georgia, and three in Uzbekistan.

Tilting Technology 

It doesn’t take a physics professor to understand that when a train is taking a turn at 200 kilometers per hour, things could get uncomfortable for passengers. That's why the West Coast Route Modernization rail renovation project in the UK uses tilting technology to counteract centrifugal forces on trains rounding corners at high speed.

Pendolino trains used on the line can tilt sideways as much as eight degrees. Sensors on the lead car calculate how much the train needs to tilt into a curve to compensate for lateral acceleration. The trains have hydraulic cylinders that carry out the instructions of the tilt sensors and suspended axles, which let the wheels fit snugly within the bending rail.

On lines with multiple twists like the Leighton/Buzzard area, where a quick left turn is followed by a quick right turn, the front of the train actually tilts one way while the rear is still tilting the other.

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