Company News Round-Up: Stephenson, Dillon, Urban Systems, AMEC, Alten Group

Stephenson Engineering, structural engineers of Toronto, has opened an office in Calgary. The office will be run by Pat Romerman who recently joined the company as a principal. He has 25 years in the Alberta market.

Dillon Consulting has partnered with the Canadian Engineering Memorial Foundation (CEMF) to provide a new scholarship to promote Canadian women in engineering. The $5,000 scholarship is for a woman undergraduate enrolled in any field of engineering study and comes with a possible summer job at one of Dillon’s offices across Canada.

A $21.3-million advanced wastewater facility in Sechelt, on the Strait of Georgia northwest of Vancouver, is being designed by Urban Systems with Veolia Water and Technologies Canada as part of a design-build consortium led by Maple Reinders Inc. (MRI). The new plant will be noise and odour free, and designed to LEED Gold standard. It is to be located in downtown Sechelt on the site of the existing Ebbtide Wastewater Treatment Plant. The MRI proposal was selected from five submissions from leading companies in the Canadian wastewater treatment sector. The plant will be commissioned in September 2014.

AMEC has been awarded two contracts by Fusion for Energy (F4E), the organization responsible for providing Europe’s contribution to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being constructed in the south of France. ITER is a large scale experiment aimed at proving the viability of producing commercial energy from fusion. The first of AMEC’s contracts is for developing the components that convert neutrons into tritium to fuel the fusion reactor. AMEC’s partners include Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, Idaho National Laboratories and Hyde Engineering Group.

A large European consulting, engineering and technology company known as The Alten Group has opened a Canadian head office in Greater Montreal. The company has 16,000 employees in 16 countries in Europe, North America and Asia and has promised to create 200 jobs within three years in Montreal. Alten specializes in helping companies with their information systems and R&D. It says it intends to offer its services in Quebec, Canada and North America that are active in the aerospace and information and communications sectors. In a statement, the company explained why it had chosen Montreal: “Greater Montreal … stood out due to its North American business environment, its Francophone and multilingual population and its proximity to major urban centres in the northeast United States, such as New York, Boston and Washington, D.C.