Markets

Scaling Up: Megaprojects Are a Big Deal

CE thinks big by profiling a chemical plant, a public-transit system and a mixed-use development.
By Christopher Durso
September 27, 2022
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Markets

In an industry of big jobs, megaprojects have always been the titans, so grand and soaring they seem to belong to another era. Think the Hoover Dam, or the Panama Canal, or the Transcontinental Railroad—captured in shadowy black-and-white photographs or grainy newsreel showing these magnificent hulks rising defiantly among the smoke and steam, transforming landscapes and reimagining what the world thought was possible.

But while the photos are a lot clearer nowadays, that yearning spirit still animates today’s megaprojects, which continue to inspire with their sense of vision, style and, well, mega-ness. Take a look at the three megaprojects Construction Executive is profiling here and see if you agree.

A note about what qualifies as a megaproject: Definitions vary, but for the purposes of this article, CE is going with construction projects that have a budget of $1 billion or more. Because everything about a megaproject is big—including the check.

PENNSYLVANIA PETROCHEMICALS COMPLEX
Potter Township, Pennsylvania

Overview

Main works contractor Bechtel is putting the finishing touches on Shell’s new Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex, which sits on 386 acres alongside the Ohio River, about 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. When it’s fully operational, the facility is expected to produce 1.6 million tons per year of polyethylene, which is the most commonly used plastic in the world today, turning up in everything from grocery bags and water bottles to toys and auto parts. Its location is no accident; the area is situated within the Marcellus and Utica shales, which are rich in the ethane gas that the plant will convert into ethylene—via a soaringly high ethane cracker—along the way to making polyethylene.

“There’s a real concentration of the customers who use polyethylene to make end products—most of them are in this region,” says Christopher Howell, Shell’s project director for the plant. “But most of the polyethylene-producing plants in the U.S. are on the Gulf Coast, so there’s a long transportation line to bring the product to customers. Seventy percent of the polyethene users in the U.S. are within a 700-mile radius of our facility. You can see how that really shortens those supply chains.”

Size & Scope

Shell officially committed financing to the project in June 2016, but Bechtel had already been working with the oil company for several years, when the initial design phase began. Site-preparation work got underway in early 2017, including removing a long-shuttered zinc plant and leveling the ground to create a clean slate for the massive new facility. Bechtel broke ground in November 2017 and construction ran into this summer, with Bechtel’s Brett Cole describing the work as “99.9% complete” during an interview in late June.

About 400 subcontractors have worked onsite, including major trades, technical services and suppliers; a big part of Cole’s job has been making sure they mesh seamlessly. “Bechtel is the main works contractor for the site,” says Cole, the Pennsylvania Chemicals Complex’s senior project manager. “We take the responsibility to integrate all the other contractors and teams who are delivering on behalf of the project. If they’re delivering design, materials, equipment—at the end of the day, it lands here, and we integrate to make sure it works. It’s very complex, very large, with a lot of moving parts which must safely align.”

Four hundred subcontractors is just one of the mega numbers that define the Pennsylvania Petro-chemicals Complex. Howell estimates that as many as 9,500 people were working onsite during the project’s peak, with “well more than 30,000” in total cycling through, all adding up to 47 million craft hours—more than 22,000 person years. According to Cole, the project involved more than 1,600 pieces of major equipment.

That’s a lot of hands and a lot of tools, but then, there’s been a lot to do. The ethane cracker itself is 288 feet tall—27 stories—and the complex includes its own railyard with 3,300 freight cars, as well as a power plant that will run the whole operation while generating enough extra capacity to supply electricity to 52,000 homes in the area. All told, the project used 42,000 tons of steel, more than 240,000 cubic yards of structural concrete, more than 1 million feet of pipe and 44,000 tons of modules. The modules came from Louisiana, Maine and Mexico, and engineering was done in Houston; Lyon, France; Munich and Dresden, Germany; and New Delhi, India.

“It’s really a global affair at the end of the day,” Howell says, “even though it’s very much a local endeavor as we build it out onsite.”

Challenges

As you might imagine, a major obstacle for any megaproject being built right now is the skilled-labor shortage. Bechtel addressed that head-on, developing strong relationships with Pittsburgh-area trades and also recruiting nationally and then internationally, bringing in craft professionals from every state in the country as well as Canada. “It was an exceptional workforce,” Cole says.

Of course, the pandemic stalled some of that momentum, but not for long. “We paused construction for a six-week period [in spring of 2020],” Howell says. “We made sure that we put in all the proper controls to manage work safely and then restarted construction as we started gradually bringing folks back in.” Proper controls included extensive onsite testing and tracing procedures, vaccination clinics and strict health protocols for lunch tents and other facilities—on a project that had already won both Shell’s and Bechtel’s safety awards for its commitment to protecting workers.

Another unexpected challenge came the year before COVID-19, during the spring of 2019, when heavy rains in the Midwest and the South led to historic flooding of the country’s inland waterways. The Arkansas and Illinois rivers, as well as parts of the Mississippi, were closed to commercial traffic—including the ships bringing modules up from Louisiana and Mexico. Even when shipping lanes reopened, water levels along the rivers were so high that the modules couldn’t fit under some bridges. “You’ve got to ballast down the barges to a deeper depth to get the modules under those bridges and get them here,” Howell says.

Final Thoughts

Get them there they did. At the time of our interview, Bechtel is beginning to transition sections of the facility over to Shell for commissioning and startup; polyethylene production should be underway before the end of the year. Bechtel is in the home stretch, which paradoxically translates into “crunch time,” according to Cole, as his teams work their way through a 10,000-item punch list.

“This is right in our wheelhouse,” Cole says. “This is a challenging job with an exceptional customer and a lot of challenges that we don’t always encounter. So, for us, this one is special, but this is right where we want to be in terms of a mega, integrated EPC [engineering, procurement and construction] project.”

SOUND TRANSIT
Seattle

Overview

As the fastest-growing U.S. big city during the 2010s, Seattle has watched traffic swell along with its population, landing the region high on other, less-complimentary lists ranking the country’s worst commutes and congestion. Not coincidentally, in 2008 and 2016, area voters approved ballot measures that together authorize a huge expansion plan for Sound Transit, the public-transit agency whose network of light-rail, commuter-rail and bus lines connects Seattle to communities around Puget Sound.

In fact, the scale of the $142-billion, decades-spanning endeavor—the largest transit-system expansion in the United States—is so big that “megaproject” might be an understatement, at least in the singular sense of the word. “It’s kind of amazing,” says Kimberly Farley, one of Sound Transit’s two deputy chief executive officers. “I have never heard of any agency taking on this many megaprojects at the same time.”

Size & Scope

Over a timeline that stretches to 2046, Sound Transit’s light rail will grow from two lines that cover 26 miles and 25 stations to five lines covering 116 miles and more than 80 stations—connecting 16 cities in three counties by extending the system north to Everett, east to Bellevue and Redmond, south to Tacoma, as well as into the neighborhoods of West Seattle. Commuter rail will pick up two stations, for a total of 14 spread over 90 miles, while 46 miles of new bus rapid transit service will serve 12 cities.

But as bewildering as those numbers are, they don’t capture the full scope of this expansion, which requires planning that’s both sweepingly macro and intensely micro, with an overlapping series of megaproject schedules that will last a generation. Along the way, Sound Transit will be tunneling 60 feet below downtown Bellevue and up to 200 feet below downtown Seattle, adding light rail to a mile-long floating bridge across Lake Washington—the first time that’s ever been done, anywhere in the world—and building around and through Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, the U.S. military’s Joint Base Lewis–McChord, multiple campuses of the University of Washington and a number of major corporate headquarters.

“We’re extending in all directions, which is really exciting,” says Ron Lewis, Sound Transit’s executive director of design, engineering and construction management. “We’re extending in all configurations. We’ve got a lot of elevated guideway, we have tunnels, we have bridge crossings, we have floating bridges. You name it, we got it somewhere in this system.”

Challenges

That technical complexity makes for one of the expansion’s biggest challenges, with the mix of project types and Seattle’s geographic diversity creating a sort of logistical endgame. How does Sound Transit keep track of it all? Farley has a succinct explanation: “Ron is a master juggler.”

Lewis, laughing, offers more detail. “We have dedicated project teams that are interdisciplinary,” he says. “One thing we learned early on is that, yes, these projects require good engineering, good designers and good contractors. But they also require partnerships—with labor, with the industry, with the community. One of the things that I see with our projects that are going the best is that collaboration and that shared ownership and responsibility.”

For Farley, that baseline degree of difficulty for an undertaking of this size is a given; it’s the unforeseen events that are the real challenge. “There are the things that you can imagine that you’re going to experience,” she says, “and then there are the things you could never imagine that you would experience and can lay over the top of that.”

Most recently, that’s included a 140-day strike by area concrete truck drivers, which led to delays on four of Sound Transit’s light-rail extensions, compounding schedule disruptions that have resulted from COVID-19. “One of the toughest calls I made at the beginning of the pandemic was to shut down construction over about 85% of our program,” Lewis says. “What was weighing heavily on me on one side, obviously, were the health issues and the concerns about safety and transmission. On the other hand, of course, I was concerned about the progress of the jobs, but that was secondary to the safety of individuals. That’s the kind of thing you have to face on the job that you don’t really cover in engineering or construction management school.”

Final Thoughts

Everyone working for and with Sound Transit seems to be aware that they’re part of a once-in-a-lifetime initiative. “You can see the pride that people have in the work that they do every single day,” Farley says. “The mindset is really one of creating something that matters for the people of this region.”

Adds Lewis, who recently celebrated 20 years with Sound Transit: “These projects have been impactful in ways that we did imagine when they were just lines on a map and in ways that we didn’t. I’ve lived in Seattle for 35 years now, and to be able to do this in your own backyard—it’s unheard of in the industry. We’re so fortunate that the timing was right for us to be able to spend so much of our career on these projects.”

PORT COVINGTON
Baltimore

Overview

To the north runs Interstate 95, to the south is the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River, and right in between, on 235 acres of formerly industrial land in South Baltimore, are the beginnings of Port Covington. The 14-million-square-foot, mixed-use development sits adjacent to the waterfront headquarters of Under Armour, and that’s no coincidence. Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank’s Sagamore Ventures is the lead investor on the megaproject, which is part of Maryland native Plank’s ongoing investment in revitalizing Baltimore.

Weller Development Partners has been leading development on phase one—aka “Chapter 1B”—of Port Covington; recently, Weller was joined by MAG Partners, a woman-owned firm, and MacFarlane Partners, a Black-owned firm, who will handle leasing for Chapter 1B as well as development for the rest of the site. MAG’s and MacFarlane’s involvement is another non-coincidence—Port Covington is committed to representing and engaging the full diversity of South Baltimore, including among suppliers, contractors and, yes, the development team. “We’re not just building a new community or a new section of Baltimore,” says Adam Genn, co-lead of development for MAG Partners. “We’re creating a new place.”

Size & Scope

There’s “big,” and then there’s “we need our own zoning” big. “We actually have our own zones within the Baltimore city zoning ordinances,” Genn says. “The PC [planned community] zones allow for the predominance of the site to have unlimited height and density and a robust mix of uses that enable us to both sell and develop parcels in accordance with what we’re hearing from the market.”

When Port Covington is fully built out, in what developers estimate will be 15 to 20 years, it will cover 45 square blocks, with millions of square feet of office, residential and retail space, plus more than 50 acres of public green space. For now, there’s “just” $700-million Chapter 1B going up—1.1 million square feet across five buildings, along with underground utilities, 10 acres of green space and 1.4 miles of new roads. Construction has involved more than 1.1 million work hours and 850 workers onsite; 140,000 cubic yards of dirt, procured from the Baltimore Department of Public Works, which excavated the dirt in the process of installing two underground aquifers for the city’s drinking-water system; and nearly 3,000 piles. “Some of the piles go up to 75 feet deep,” says Greg Hermandorfer, vice president of construction for Weller. “That’s a good sense of how much work had to be done before we could even really go vertical.”

Challenges

Chapter 1B alone involves four different general contractors—Whiting-Turner, Clark Construction, CBG Building Company and Bozzuto Construction Company—some of them direct competitors, all of them working simultaneously and literally side by side on five substantial buildings. To keep tabs on them and everything else about the projects, the developers have relied on a mix of third-party construction managers, browser-accessible technology platforms and old-fashioned elbow-rubbing. For that last piece, they converted an old boat-repair shop on the site into an office for the general contractors and the Weller team. “So, everybody’s gotta play nice in the sandbox, but you’re also always walking back to this space and crossing paths with people,” Hermandorfer says. “We did that by design, so that there’s more interaction.”

They also conduct weekly check-in meetings with all the general contractors, plus quarterly reviews with each company individually to monitor group dynamics. “We’ve got a one-page scorecard that everybody fills out, and we sit down at lunch and just hash it out,” Hermandorfer says. “Get all the issues off your chest right then and there, so you can keep moving and you’re not waiting until the end to resolve problems.” He adds: “It’s communication. That’s obvious—always a big one.”

For Genn, the main challenge of a megaproject like Port Covington is more fundamental. “Creating something from nothing is really difficult,” he says. “Getting all the entitlements to do that, and then to build all the roads and infrastructure at the same time that these five buildings are going up, is an enormous effort that speaks to the quality of the execution team here.”

While the pandemic itself didn’t affect Port Covington all that directly—Chapter 1B didn’t break ground until February 2021—its aftereffects have, including materials shortages and supply-chain problems. Wood prices shot up at the start of the project, leading the team to consider OSB board, for example, while one of the buildings saw its windows held up. In both cases, general contractors, architects, materials consultants and developers reacted quickly and collaboratively. “We went through all kinds of different options for new solutions,” Hermandorfer says. “That was to everybody’s credit. Everybody did a great job.”

Final Thoughts

Chapter 1B isn’t scheduled to wrap until next spring or summer, but Port Covington is already busy making itself a part of South Baltimore. The developers have signed a memo of understanding with the City of Baltimore and a community benefits agreement with six area neighborhoods guaranteeing that affordable housing, local hiring and job training, supplier diversity, grant money and other initiatives will be part of the megaproject.

“A lot of us feel like all of our prior careers have led to this moment,” says Genn, a Baltimore native, who as a member of Port Covington’s development team serves on the board of the recently created South Baltimore 7 Coalition along with representatives from the six neighborhoods. “At the end of the day, it’s deeply rewarding because we’re creating places for people to live, to enjoy and to try and impact the trajectory of people’s lives. If that’s what we’ve accomplished, then we’ve been successful.”

Adds Hermandorfer: “Just the idea of getting to transform and build a mini city and have this big of an impact on Baltimore—I love it.”

by Christopher Durso

Chris leads Construction Executive’s day-to-day operations—overseeing all print and digital content, design and production efforts, and working with the editorial team to tell the many stories of America’s builders and contractors. An experienced association magazine editor, writer and publications strategist, he is a graduate of Saint Joseph’s University and lives in Arlington, Virginia.

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