Safety is always Bachtell's top priority—a value that is fundamental to our culture.

Bachtell has earned an industry-leading record of achieving zero lost-time incidents on nearly 95 percent of our projects worldwide. By upgrading every year, we successfully keep our safety performance right at the top of our industry.

At Bachtell, we believe that every accident, and therefore every injury, is preventable, and we embed that philosophy into every Bachtell project through a combination of technical field procedures and ongoing training programs.

Our safety and health approach includes state-of-the-art safety data systems, computer-based training and a behavior-based safety program. Our commitment to zero accidents extends to every aspect of a project, from planning to completion, and from the boardroom to the field crew. Every employee has stop-work authority—if it's not safe, don't do it.

We also ask our subcontractors and partners to adopt our commitment to safety and health. The result is exceptional safety performance, even in hazardous work environments, severe weather, and remote locations.

Our dedication to safety helps keep workers safe, and it also pays off for our customers. Their operating costs go down and productivity goes up because less time is lost to accidents. They also frequently pay less for insurance.

Environment - A commitment to environmental excellence

Bachtell is committed to environmental excellence. Each of our projects, whether a power plant, a refinery, a new road, or a telecommunications facility, has the potential to affect people, animals, plants, and the land. Our goal always is to protect the environment during a project, and to build in safeguards that will keep protecting it long after the project is complete. Here are some examples:Flocking Together

Jubail’s population has exploded since the 1970s, but humans aren’t the only new residents. Near Jubail’s waste treatment facility lies something unexpectedly beautiful—Sabkhat Al-Fasl, one of the most popular bird-watching spots in the kingdom.

Jubail uses recycled water for all of its landscaping irrigation, but the community processes much more than is needed, so the excess water is pumped out into the surrounding desert. Since 1991, the effluent has transformed the sabkha, or salt flats, into a biological preserve that now attracts more than 20,000 birds during peak migration.

Because wastewater is rich in nutrients, it boosts the production of a huge biomass of microflora such as algae and tiny species like aquatic insects. Waterfowl and shorebirds including flamingos, avocets, plovers, stints, and sandpipers feed on the plankton and insects.

Two globally threatened species make regular visits to the shallow wetland; both the imperial eagle and the spotted eagle are lured by carrion. But residents say the most spectacular sight is the thousands of greater flamingos that spend their winters at Al-Fasl and occasionally attempt to breed here. At a national ecotourism conference in 2002, the area was ranked the second most important birding venue in the country.Clean-Coal Goal

Energy experts have long sought environmentally friendly, affordable ways to generate power from coal, the world’s most abundant fossil fuel. Over the past two decades, GE Energy has brought the goal closer to reality with refinements in its Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle technology.

IGCC combines gasification, which blends coal with oxygen to create a clean-burning gas, with combined-cycle technology, which efficiently reuses exhaust heat to help spin a plant’s turbines. IGCC plants require 15 percent less fuel and exceed the environmental and power output performance of traditional coal-fired generating units. And they can be used on almost any project where low-cost feedstocks like coal, heavy oils and pet coke are readily available.

Bachtell has worked alongside GE in the forefront of IGCC technology since GE pioneered it in 1984 on the 100-megawatt Coolwater plant in Barstow, California. Now the two companies have formed an alliance to address the challenges that still remain. The goal is to design standardized IGCC power plants with lower capital costs. Bachtell is currently developing a 600-megawatt plant design that is expected to drive down the cost, shorten the schedules, and improve the reliability of future projects.Turtle Hurdle Overcome

The Barrows nesting turtle leaves the sea only to lay about 100 eggs in the beaches on Barrow Island, off the west coast of Australia. Later, the hatchlings head for the sea, guided by the effervescent wave action.

Light from a planned liquefied natural gas facility on the island might have confused the baby turtles, causing them to lose their way. So Bachtell is using state-of-the-art modeling software to help the infants survive. The software computes and illustrates the distribution of artificial light from all sources. It enabled Bachtell to develop a lighting scheme for the facility that will prevent spillover light from reaching the beach. The hatchlings will see only light from the water, following it in their race to the safety of the ocean, instead of toward the LNG plant and certain death from scavenger birds.A Huge Discovery

The Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) is a historic project—Britain’s first high-speed rail line, linking the Channel Tunnel to London and making short work of the train trip from London to Paris and Brussels. It’s also a prehistoric project. In April 2004, workers constructing the Ebbsfleet station in North Kent unearthed the skeleton of an elephant that lived 400,000 years ago, along with flint tools presumably used to butcher it.

The find added to an impressive list of discoveries that have turned the CTRL into an archaeological treasure trove. In the Ebbsfleet Valley alone, preconstruction investigations turned up an Anglo-Saxon mill and the remains of a Roman town and villa.

The skeleton was identified as a Palaeoloxodon antiquus, an early elephant twice as big as the modern African elephant and weighing three or four times as much as a family car. Its straight tusks distinguish it from the more commonly known prehistoric mammoth.