Honeywell opens Alaska facility: two moose attended the ribbon-cutting.

• Author: Stomierowski, Peg
• Position: BUSINESS SPOTLIGHT

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The first day Honeywell threw open the doors to its 5, 300-square-foot facility on Business Park Boulevard, two moose showed up, tells Bob Eubank, program manager at the new site. It was winter in Anchorage. As Eubank, who relocated from Texas, recalls, "there was a Bull Moose and a cow moose at the front door."

The project-services business that debuted here in late January--the new guy on the block in the expanding Honeywell presence in Alaska--houses the new Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS) center that strives to offer automation and control solutions to industrial customers to improve safety, reliability and efficiency. Mostly they are customers, like BP, in the expanding oil, gas and refining field that seek comprehensive project management and engineering assistance to improve core functions, save costs and remedy shortfalls.

Honeywell's Anchorage managers view the areas of automation-systems control and production monitoring as their core competencies. Competitors on the global technology solutions stage include Yokogawa, Emerson and Invensys.

PIPELINE AHEAD

Honeywell also plays a role in Alaska in pipeline automation surveillance and corrosion monitoring and management. Most of its fieldwork tends to center in North Slope production areas, reportedly believed to have the greatest remaining oil potential of any U.S. onshore area. Goals focus on better productivity, safety, energy efficiency and general reliability.

When troubles occur in the Alaska oilfields, it threatens to send energy-market ripples through the Alaska and U.S. economies. The state reportedly is continuing to seek a negotiated settlement with BP over oil revenues it says it lost when the company partially shut down the Prudhoe Bay oil field because of pipeline leaks in 2006. Not without irony, prices for Alaska oil, coupled with pipeline corrosion recovery efforts, reportedly have led to rising employment levels on the North Slope. The area also contains the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

A CHALLENGE

Meanwhile, back at the January opening of the new Honeywell office in Anchorage, in a sometimes rugged environment where the quality-control and monitoring push have introduced a decidedly technological business tongue, you could tell the landscape wasn't Houston. One of the first safety topics was sharing the company's new environment with moose.

That's not so far a field...