Betchel - Angola LNG Project

Trained for Performance At the Angola LNG project, Bechtel worked with craft workers and subcontractors to instill our best -in-class quality and safety standards. Workers completed more than 200,000 hours of safety and health, basic skills, and English-language training—achieving 23 million consecutive job hours without a lost time incident.

With a history of megaprojects that includes the largest infrastructure, petrochemicals, mining, and power jobs of the 20th century, Bechtel ranks among the world’s leading engineering and construction firms. Size itself is not our goal, yet our projects are often among the largest of their type, in a region, or for a customer. At various times, we have been under way on the biggest projects on five of the six major continents. At the time it was awarded, the Angola LNG project on Africa’s west coast was Bechtel’s largest lump-sum project ever. It was also our first in this rapidly developing nation. As host to its first large-scale onshore project, Soyo, Angola, offered minimal cargo and materials receiving facilities, vendors, and skilled labor. We worked with authorities to build a new dock and to expedite shipments through customs. We developed extensive training for local craft workers and a global recruiting program for positions that could not be filled locally. We provided, on average, 25 hours of training for each of the 8,000 local craft workers we hired. Success on Angola LNG demanded teamwork, innovation, discipline, integration, and coordination at every step and between every function to assure alignment of project objectives with customer and community expectations in real time. The aggressive schedule meant an around-the-clock assignment for our design engineers. For that, we relied on a “virtual team” of coworkers in London, Houston, Tokyo, Shanghai, and New Delhi, united by a network of dedicated servers devised to ease their collaboration on CAD drawings and other documents simultaneously or in successive 24/7 shifts. Of course, innovative systems alone did not deliver success. Collaborative and disciplined engineering, procurement, construction, project controls, and project management supervision and leadership were essential to integrate, coordinate, and stay aligned in this deployed, simultaneous model. Angola LNG exemplifies Bechtel applied know-how at its finest, winning two of our most prestigious internal honors in 2011 — Construction Team of the Year and Safety Project of the Year. More important, we satisfied our Angola LNG customer sufficiently to win Chevron’s trust for the award of its Wheatstone LNG project in 2011.