company is also working on a butyl rubber plant for Lanxess in Singapore.

Jacobs is also involved in oil sands projects in Alberta, though activity has cooled because of the drop in oil prices and escalating capital costs, Martin says. “If oil prices remain stable and construction costs de-escalate, work will resume in Alberta.”

The chemical industry represents about 6% of CH2M Hill’s revenues, which exceed $6 billion/year, says Don Olson, senior v.p./chemicals business unit at CH2M Hill. “Over the last three years our service revenue from the chemical industry has just about doubled,” Olson says. However, “we saw new orders slow dramatically late last summer and early autumn as tightening credit markets and the precipitous drop in new home and automobile sales began to impact many of our traditional chemicals clients,” he says. “As a result, many of the projects we had in the pipeline for kick-off in early 2009 have been delayed.”

CH2M Hill’s major projects include an EPC management contract for BASF’s acrylic resin plant at Wyandotte, MI. The project is expected to be fully operational by the second half of 2009.

CB&I reported first-quarter 2009 revenues down 11%, to $875 million, for its combined Lummus Technology and CB&I Lummus units. New orders for the units fell 34%, to $298 million. CB&I cites several factors for the decreases, including the CB&I Lummus unit’s lower revenues from an unspecified LNG terminal project that the company took a charge for in the 2008 quarter, and a project loss of about $20 million in first-quarter 2009. Also, fewer licensing contract revenues negatively affected Lummus Technology results, it says.

Essar Gujarat Petrochemicals (Ahmedabad, India) awarded license and basic engineering contracts to CB&I Lummus last year, worth a combined $45 million, for a grassroot petchem complex at Vadinar, India. The technologies will be for plants producing ethylene; ethylbenzene and styrene; butadiene; methyl tert-butyl ether, ethyl tert-butyl ether, and butene- 1; and cumene and phenol, CB&I says.

Lummus Technology signed a contract late last year to license Shaanxi Xin Xing Coal Chemical Science & Technology Development’s (SYN; Dalian, China) metha-nol-to-olefins (MTO) technology worldwide. The newly developed technology can help producers expand capacity-restricted olefin plants, CB&I says. The process will

be used commercially for the first time at a previously announced MTO plant being developed by Shenhua Baotou Coal Chemicals at Baotou, China.

KBR’s Downstream unit, which includes petchems, posted first-quarter income of $6 million and overhead costs of $6 million, compared with $8 million for the year-ago period. Income included costs related to an equipment failure on an EBIC ammonia project in Egypt and positive contributions from a Yanbu export refinery project, as well as program management services for a Ras Tanura project in Saudi Arabia, KBR says.

The Downstream unit’s backlog grew 52%, to $584 million. Egypt Hydrocarbon Corporation (EHC) recently awarded KBR a front-end engineering design (FEED) contract for an ammonium nitrate (AN) plant that will form part of a proposed manufacturing complex near Suez, Egypt. The plant will be designed to produce 1,060 m.t./day of AN and include a nitric acid facility. KBR will perform engineering services for both the process units as well as the utilities and offsites for the plant (CW, April 13, p. 19).

Shaw Group’s Energy and Chemicals division posted revenues for its fiscal sec-

 

Healthy demand in the solar cell industry has energized growth for the engineering and construction (E&C) firms serving the sector. Solar industry market sales are expected to reach $100 billion in 2013, up from $33 billion in 2008, says market research firm Lux Research (New York). Growth will be driven by aggressive capacity expansion and increasing availability of polysilicon, Lux says.

Jacobs Engineering says it expects to benefit from investments in polysilicon, the key raw material in solar cells. “I’m not sure that there will be global growth in the near-term for polysilicon, but investments are continuing,” despite lower polysilicon prices, says Craig Martin, Jacobs CEO.

Estelux (San Pietro in Gù, Italy) recently awarded Jacobs an engineering, procurement, and construction management (EPCM) contract for a €360-million ($558 million) polysilicon facility. The 4,000-m.t./year plant will be built at Estelux’ Ferrara, Italy petrochemical site and is expected online in 2010.

Shaw Group calls polysilicon projects a “strong growth opportunity.” Shaw won an EPCM contract from Hoku Materials ( Honolulu) in 2007 to build a 3,500-m.t./year plant

ond quarter, ended February 28, up 21%, to $331.2 million. Client activity accelerated in February and is “very, very significant at this time,” Shaw says. Petchem demand in Asia is “starting to pick up,” says president and CEO Jim Bernhard.

Shaw’s recent wins include a contract to provide basic engineering support for a Sasol Fischer-Tropsch unit that will form part of a paraffin wax project at Sasol’s Sasolburg complex. Petrokemya, a Sabic subsidiary, also awarded Shaw a FEED services contract for a grassroots acrylonitrile butadiene styrene plant in Saudi Arabia. The plant will have capacity for 200,000 m.t./year and be built at Al Jubail.

Some E&C firms are expanding their technology offerings and forming alliances. Uhde completed construction last year of what became the world’s first plant to use HPPO technology, developed jointly with Evonik, for SKC Chemical Group (Seoul) at Ulsan, Korea, and it is about to commercialize new technology to produce polylactic acid for an undisclosed client in Germany. Uhde is also considering options to offer add-on construction services. “Contractors need to offer the full EPC ser-

 

at Pocatello, ID. The plant is due for completion in the second half.

Fluor is involved in several polysilicon projects and is set to complete EPCM work this month on a 5,000-m.t/year plant at Kristiansand, Norway for Elkem Solar (Oslo), says Peter Oosteveer, president/Energy and Chemicals Group at Fluor. Financial details were not disclosed. “Elkem has been shipping product since April,” Fluor says. “After a short production break to fine tune the process in late April, production will commence again in early May with a gradual ramp up to full capacity.”

In China, overall construction is nearly complete on LDK Solar’s (Xinyu, China) $1.2-billion facility at Xinyu, Oosterveer says. Fluor is the EPCM contractor at the site. The 15,000-m.t./year plant also includes a 90,000-m.t./year trichlorosilane manufacturing unit. LDK is in the process of commissioning the utilities, and the plant is expected online this quarter, Oosterveer says. LDK Solar is a major producer of multicrystalline solar wafers, used mainly for solar cells.

—REBECCA COONS AND ESTHER D’AMICO