Contract Wins: GE, Navarro, Amyris, CH2M Hill

Over the last 12 months GE Power Conversion has won contracts valued at more than $600 million to provide propulsion systems with customers leading the pre-salt oilfield expansion off Brazil’s east coast. Currently GE is in the process of building systems for 22 of the 29 drillships for the current phase of the Brazilian oil and gas exploration by Brazilian energy corporation Petrobras.

NASA has selected Navarro Research and Engineering of Oak Ridge, Tenn., to provide environmental compliance and restoration services at the agency’s White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, NM. The contract calls for a two-year base period beginning June 1 and extending through May 31, 2015. The entire maximum potential value of the contract including all options is $80 million.

Renewable products company Amyris, which focuses on producing sustainable alternatives to a range of petroleum-sourced products, and French oil giant Total intend to form a joint venture company by mid-2013 to market renewable diesel, jet fuel, and other specialty products derived from Biofene, Amyris’s renewable brand of farnesene. Amyris has also confirmed that Total will provide $30 million of funding to Amyris by July 2013 as anticipated in the revised collaboration agreement announced last year. Amyris has also announced an expansion of its Novvi joint venture with Cosan. The company has also met the technical milestones at its production plant in Brazil needed to satisfy a follow-on common stock investment of $5 million from its existing investor, Biolding Investment SA.

Fuel Tech has received air pollution control orders totaling $4.3 million. The largest of these orders is from a Midwest utility for a nitrogen oxide reduction project on a coal-fired boiler. This project will utilize Fuel Tech’s HERT High Energy Reagent Technology and NOxOUT Selective Non-Catalytic Reduction injection technologies. Equipment deliveries are scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2013.

Babcock & Wilcox Power Generation Group has been awarded a contract to deliver, erect and commission a dry flue gas desulfurization system for Interstate Power and Light Company’s 270 MW coal-fired Lansing Generating Station in Lansing, Iowa. Construction on the Lansing project is scheduled to begin in 2014 and to be completed in 2015.

Green Hygienics, which manufactures bamboo-based personal care products and tissues, has received an additional wholesale purchase order from Avanti Distribution, the company’s exclusive Canadian distributor. The multi-container purchase order for Sensational Brand bath tissue originated from one of Canada’s largest retailers with well over 500 locations across the country.

Construction and consulting firm CH2M Hill has been awarded a project to develop an economic master plan for Brazil’s Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Region. The project team will deliver a broad range of services that relate to the 463-square-mile area’s social and economic development. Brazil is seeking recommendations for building modern infrastructure in the region, rooted in the concepts of sustainable occupation, innovation and economic development for the modern knowledge economy and mobility.