e-Paper - SVAT Astatine - Universiteit Twente

Advertorial Fluor
Elkem Solar, a Truly International Silicon Project
In a small town on the Southern tip of Norway,
Fluor is busy transforming the Elkem factory
skyline with a new facility that will be proudly displayed
adjacent to the sea. It has been a while
since Fluor has executed work in Norway and we
are proud that Elkem Solar have brought us back
again to this part of the world to help them enter
the solar grade silicon production market.
The project started out November 2006 in Fluor’s
Greenville SC office in the USA with conceptual
engineering and scope development and was
moved to our Haarlem Netherlands office last
July when resources became available to take
over from Greenville. Since that time, Haarlem
picked up the remaining design work and is
nearing completion of engineering using a Norwegian
subcontractor to provide detailed design
services. A site construction management team
has been built from a diverse group of Fluor professionals
coming from the Netherlands, United
States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, Australia,
and Canada, and construction has started to
take off.
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Fluor
In addition to engineering and procurement services,
the Haarlem offi ce is providing all of the
support necessary for a project located where
Fluor does not have a permanent presence. This
includes staffing and recruitment, tax services,
payroll, and other critical functions that go on “in
the background”, and are usually only noticed if
they aren’t working.
The project includes four new large structures,
and extensive renovations of two existing buildings,
all of which will contain the processing
equipment that produce the required purity
grade of silicon. The construction work is subcontracted
to mainly Norwegian contractors as
well as some specialty equipment installers from
Germany, France, and even from as far away as
South Africa. This is truly an international project
and one that Fluor will point to with pride
when it is finished in late 2008. The construction
work has “come out of the ground” and we are
relieved that structural concrete and steel are
now everyone’s focus because excavation was
not simple.