Employees, customers and public officials celebrated in late October the official grand opening of ABB's business unit expansion in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. The $14 million project is part of ABB's ongoing investment in its North American oil and gas operations, and is intended to help meet regional and global customer demand for its measurement products, engineering and project services. This is ABB's third expansion of the Bartlesville site since 2000.
The facility designs, develops and manufactures natural gas and liquids measurement products and analyzers, as well as software applications and system solutions for the global oil and gas market under the TotalFlow brand. The expansion effectively doubles the facility size by adding 100,000 square feet of space, and is expected to double the size of the local workforce over the next 10 years by adding 250 jobs, a majority of which are expected to be in technical and engineering disciplines.
"The strength of the oil and gas market, specifically unconventional drilling activity, has provided our business a great opportunity for growth in recent years," says Gayle Lester, general manager of ABB's Bartlesville Measurement Products facility. Lester said she was particularly proud that the 17-month project was completed without a single lost-time safety incident for ABB or its contractors.