Aerial view of worker accommodations and construction camp facilities at the Fort Hills oil sands project.

Jim Brittain, president of Fluor’s Energy & Chemicals business for the Americas region, said, “Fluor will apply our unique modular design and execution approach using our proprietary Third Gen Modular Execution technology. We will fabricate a significant number of components off site in order to deliver both schedule and capital efficiencies to Fort Hills.”

The Fort Hills project will be developed as an open-pit truck and shovel mine and is planned to yield 180,000 barrels of bitumen per day at full production. First oil is expected as early as the fourth quarter of 2017. In June, Aecon Group was awarded a mining contract with an estimated value of $123 million by Fort Hills Energy L.P. for mine site development at the Fort Hills oil sands project in Alberta. Work on that contract has begun and is expected to be complete in the second quarter of 2016.

The Fort Hills project is owned by Fort Hills Energy L.P., a partnership between Suncor Energy, Total E&P Canada Ltd. and Teck Resources Ltd.

The Fort Hills partners voted unanimously in late October 2013 to proceed with the project. Suncor is the developer and operator of the project via an operating services contract. It is scheduled to produce first oil as early as the fourth quarter of 2017 and achieve 90% of its planned production capacity within 12 months. With best estimate contingent resources of approximately 3.3 billion barrels of bitumen, the mine life is expected to be in excess of 50 years at the current planned production rate.

The go-forward capital investment in Fort Hills was estimated at approximately $13.5 billion. Total project cost is estimated at a capital intensity of approximately $84,000 per flowing barrel of bitumen—within the range of similar recently completed oil sands mining projects, according to Suncor.