Module manufacturing makes sense for Alaska: these truckable and sealift modules are manufactured here and shipped to the North Slope.

• Author: Bradner, Mike

Alaskans talk a lot about luring high-tech manufacturing industries to Alaska. The jobs they bring are high skill and high wage.

The fact is, however, that already we have a high-tech manufacturing industry in Alaska and we've had it for more than a decade.

It has had its up and downs, of course. It's not on the scale of what Boeing does for Seattle, or as visible.

Still, the engineering and fabrication in Alaska of modular process facilities for oil and gas projects have created hundreds of jobs for highly skilled Alaskan workers.

Processing facilities are those large plants on the North Slope that separate natural gas and produced water from crude oil. The water is injected back into the underground rock formations and the gas is either reinjected or shipped off for uses in the oil fields.

Production modules like these are typically built elsewhere and shipped to the North Slope because constructing them on the Slope would be prohibitively expensive.

They are huge metal boxes-buildings really-filled with high-tech electronics, pipes, tanks and pumps, and weigh hundreds, even thousands, of tons. Big ones must be moved by barge.

ALLEN'S DREAM

Alaskans have been building small modules in the state since 1988 and large ones were built between 1998 and 2000. If credit goes to anyone for creating an Alaska module-building industry, it is to Bill Allen, founder of Alaska-based VECO Corporation, an oil services and construction company.

Close behind Allen would come

Arctic Slope Regional Corp. of Barrow, through its oil field services company Natchiq Inc., now ASRC Energy Services.

During the 1970s, as the North Slope oil fields were being constructed, Allen watched big contracts for construction of oil and gas processing modules go to out-of-state companies. There were thousands of jobs created in fabrication yards in the Pacific Northwest, Louisiana and South Korea.

Allen felt that Alaskans could build these modules. For years the oil producing companies didn't listen. Allen got a chance to show Alaskan workers had the right stuff when he landed contracts to build several small truckable modules for expansion projects in the Kuparuk River and Prudhoe Bay fields. The first of these was built by VECO in 1988 in Wasilla.

These weren't the big sealift modules Allen wanted to build, but it was a start.

SEALIFTS ARRIVE

ASRC began building truckable modules soon after VECO, and other companies, like H.C. Price, also built modules.

Within a few years...