Bechtel, a major contractor for the Energy Department’s nuclear complex, announced June 7 it will move its corporate headquarters to one of Washington, D.C.’s Northern Virginia suburbs.
The international engineering, procurement, and construction company said it will move corporate operations from Houston and San Francisco to Reston, Va., by the end of 2018. Bechtel already has an office in Reston, which is about 23 miles outside the U.S. capital in Fairfax County.
“For more than a decade, Bechtel’s corporate leadership has been distributed across Houston, Reston, and San Francisco,” said Bechtel President and Chief Operating Officer Jack Futcher in a press release. “Consolidating the corporate leadership and operations in Reston will enable the company to thrive in the current fast-paced business environment – one that demands faster and seamless decision-making, integration, and collaboration.” Bechtel will keep offices in Houston and San Francisco.
About 1,300 Bechtel employees now work in the Reston office, which is already home base for the company’s Nuclear, Security and Environmental unit. The move will add about 150 employees, mostly management and corporate staffers. The shift isn’t expected to have a major impact on Bechtel’s Energy Department complex operations given most of those jobs are based at the sites.
Bechtel is the prime contractor for construction and operation of the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) at the Hanford Site in Washington state, under a $14.7 billion contract that extends through December 2022, according to a DOE website. It is a partner in the current liquid waste management contractor at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the outgoing management and operations prime for the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico.
Bechtel is also a member of the BWX Technologies-led group that initially won the new 10-year, $4.7 billion liquid waste management contract for the Savannah River Site in October 2017. The award was at least temporarily undone when the the Government Accountability Office in February sustained a protest by one of the losing bidders. The Energy Department is currently considering resubmitted bids from the three competing teams.
Bechtel partnered with Purdue University to seek the next Los Alamos management contract. The Energy Department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration announced on June 8 it had awarded the contract to Triad National Security, a partnership of Battelle Memorial Institute, the University of California, and Texas A&M University.
Bechtel is a privately-held company with about 50,000 employees worldwide.
