Building blocks: Alaska's oilfield modules: facilitating a multi-billion dollar industry.

• Author: Swann, Kirsten
• Position: OIL & GAS

Some of the most basic building blocks of Alaska's oilfields begin as metal frames on a shop floor. They can weigh up to several thousand tons. They're pieced together, loaded onto a truck or a train or a barge, and hauled out to some of the more remote parts of the state where they become part of the infrastructure that keeps Alaska's petroleum business afloat.

Oilfield modules--self-contained production, power, and support systems--help facilitate a multibillion-dollar industry. Once in operation, they house the technologies and workforce that run some of the most valuable industrial operations in the state. But those modules pass through many hands before they ever go into commission.

The companies that build them are multifaceted businesses with deep ties to the state's oil and gas industry.

In Alaska, modular construction employs hundreds of people and a plethora of skillsets. It keeps shops busy from Anchorage to Big Lake and beyond. While some projects still use modules built outside the state, the in-state industry is alive and well.

In Big Lake, spanning more than twenty-eight acres, NANA Construction's fabrication facility handles a steady flow of business.

The facility is operated by NANA subsidiary GIS (Grand Isle Shipyard) Alaska. According to Sagen Juliussen, president of GIS Alaska, the fabrication plant currently has around 120 employees, "about the same number as last year at this time."

Nondisclosure agreements with the facility's customers prevent the company from talking about current clients or projects, but past work has included everything from camps and light commercial projects to Arctic-grade, blast-resistant modules built for major oil companies, independent explorers, and producers.

Last spring, the shop was packed with work for BP, according to local newspaper reports at the time. It has produced more than three hundred truckable modules since 2009.

"With the capabilities of GIS now in Alaska, we are offering a wide range of services to the market in Alaska and have thirty to forty people working in Cook Inlet and the same number at the Red Dog Mine, plus fifty people working on the North Slope," a NANA spokeswoman writes in an email. "We now also provide onshore and offshore operations and maintenance services, steel pipe, skids, modules, and installation services."

A little more than an hour down the road from the Big Lake fabrication facility, several other businesses produce oilfield modules in Alaska's largest city.

Full Menu of Equipment

SteelFab, which operates an eighty-four-thousand-square-foot facility on a ten-acre site near downtown Anchorage, uses a full menu of heavy-duty equipment to fabricate an array of industrial necessities.

To cut, shear, and punch, the company works with a controlled-flame plasma cutting machine, a controlled automation plate duplication/hole punch, and a handful of specialized shears and saws. To form, it works with two press brakes of differing lengths, plate rolls, and a pipe and tube rolling machine.

The equipment allows SteelFab to build nearly anything: tanks, cranes, rails and walkways, structural steel buildings, and special-design items, not to mention module buildings for Alaska's oilfields.

Besides the long list of equipment, the company boasts multiple certifications from the American Institute of...