SNC-Lavalin (TSX: SNC), in a consortium that includes General Electric International Inc., has been awarded a turnkey contract by PKN Orlen to build a combined cycle power plant in Wloclawek, Poland. The value of the company’s portion of the contract is estimated at $183.7 million. PKN Orlen is one of Central Europe’s largest crude oil refiners and fuel retailers.

Designed to meet stringent environmental requirements, the plant will produce 463 MW of power through a gas turbine with a heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) and steam turbine. SNC-Lavalin’s mandate will include the provision of all plant equipment, excluding the gas turbine (with HRSG) and the steam turbine and generator. The company will also provide project management, engineering, procurement, construction, start up and commissioning services for the overall project.

“SNC-Lavalin is extremely proud to work on this important contract for PKN Orlen,” said Patrick Lamarre, Executive Vice-President, Global Power, SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. “We are honoured to provide our industry leading expertise to support PKN Orlen in its goal to supply clean and efficient energy.”

Construction is scheduled to start in March, 2013, and is expected to take 36 months.

Technip was awarded by Shell Global Solutions (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd a framework agreement for offshore facilities in a region covering Asia, Australia, and New Zealand (“East region”). The contract is for a period of five years, with an additional five-year extension option.

The contract concerns engineering and project management services to support Shell’s offshore project facilities engineering scope in the East region. The scope of work includes pre-front-end engineering design, front-end engineering design, detailed design engineering, procurement services and construction management.

Technip's operating center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia will execute the contract with the support of other operating centers in Asia Pacific.

Siemens Division Industry Automation and Bentley Systems today announced a strategic collaboration to advance the integration of digital product design and manufacturing processes design with information modeling for facilities lifecycle design. According to the Memorandum of Understanding the collaboration will enable the two companies to deliver intelligent and sustainable digital factory infrastructure. Initially the companies will focus on the digital factory for automotive and discrete manufacturing.

The Siemens Division Industry Automation and Bentley Systems will initially, based on their longstanding commitment to openness in information technology, collaborate on common file formats and content, integrated workflows for factory layout, and the convergence of process and layout. This work is an extension of earlier collaborations between the two organizations that resulted in each deploying technology offerings developed by the other. In the longer term, the companies will explore opportunities for jointly developed technology to expand industry-centric solutions and further collaboration interoperability between Siemens' Teamcenter and Bentley's ProjectWise software.

Teamcenter product lifecycle management software helps companies deliver increasingly complex products while maximizing productivity and streamlining global operations. It provides the right information for people to make the right product decisions – from planning and development through manufacturing and support. The ProjectWise system of collaboration servers and services empowers work sharing, facilitating the use of virtual talent, dynamic review for improved project quality, and content reuse for extended value.

Siemens Industry Automation Division CEO Anton S. Huber said, "Together we will drive the paradigm shift that will establish unified and fully collaborative product and production lifecycles for our customers. This will facilitate workflow efficiencies moving our users to the next level of productivity. Today, it is more important than ever to make full use of all optimization opportunities over the entire lifecycle of a machine or plant. This starts with planning and engineering, and continues into operation and maintenance right through to expansion and modernization. Now, as we seek to extend this to include facilities lifecycles, we have determined that Bentley Systems is the right partner to help us bring this new value proposition to realization."

Rotork is supplying an all-electric valve actuation package encompassing isolating, regulating and modulating actuators with two-wire digital control for the DanTysk offshore wind farm in the North Sea.

Almost one hundred Rotork quarter-turn electric actuators will control butterfly valves on the DanTysk transformer platform, situated 70 kilometres west of the German island of Sylt. The contract includes fitting the actuators to the valves, which has been performed prior to delivery at the specialist actuation workshop facilities attached to Rotork Holland, where the order was won.

Approximately half the actuators are IQTPro intelligent isolating and regulating duty units, the balance comprising CVA fully modulating control valve actuators. Both designs share advanced and user friendly non-intrusive programming and commissioning technologies, combined with comprehensive integral data logging, diagnostic and asset management capabilities. Rugged, double-sealed IP68 watertight and explosionproof enclosures enhance long-term reliability in the harshest of environments, as can often be encountered in offshore applications.

Rotork CVA electric actuators deliver continuous, repeatable modulating control with a programmable fail to position option. Resolution, repeatability and hysteresis performance is quoted at less than 0.1% of full scale, offering suitability for the most demanding control valve applications.

Digital two-wire control is provided by Rotork’s proprietary Pakscan P3 system, the third generation of a market-leading product, capable of monitoring and controlling up to 240 field units without repeaters on a single highway with a length of up to 20 kilometres. Designed specifically for the valve actuation environment, Pakscan incorporates secure field communications with inbuilt network redundancy to maintain control even in the event of equipment or cable failure. On the DanTysk project the Pakscan network master station will link the actuators to a distributed control system and to a remote, centralised monitoring centre situated at Esbjerg in Denmark.