The Working In Blog

Conveyors at the Newman Hub processing centre

Australia currently has tremendous job opportunities on some the biggest heavy construction projects wordlwide.

Within the construction industry the term “heavy” refers to items produced such as iron ore, coal, oil and gas etc. Owners of heavy construction projects are usually large, for-profit, industrial corporations. These corporations can be found in such industries as Infrastructure, power transmission and distribution, metallurgical and material handling, oil and gas, chemical, power generation, mineral processing etc.

Heavy construction projects require a team of qualified individuals to ensure successful project completion. Specifically, in the fields of mechanical and structural engineering, project management, construction management, quality surveying, Health Safety & Environmental and quality assurance management. In Australia majority of heavy construction projects are located in regional areas ‘outback Australia’ therefore, fly in and fly out (FIFO) rosters have been adopted as a method of employment.

Read on for details on some of the biggest current projects here in Australia:

Port Hedland Inner Harbour Project

PHIHP involves the expanding operations at Finucane Island and Nelson Point at Port Hedland’s inner harbour to allow the export of 240 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of Iron ore from 2014, up from the current rate of around 155mtpa.

Wheatstone LNG Project

Wheatstone is a Chevron operated natural gas field about 200 kilometres north of Onslow in Western Australia. Its gas fields in the Carnarvon Basin will form the foundation for the Wheatstone Project. Wheatstone will bring enormous economic benefits to Australia:

• The project will create about 6,500 direct and indirect jobs at the construction peak
• Wheatstone will also create about $17 billion in local content spending over the project’s life.

Macedon Project

The Macedon project involves four offshore production wells supplying a wet gas pipeline to an onshore gas treatment plant to be constructed at Ashburton North, 17 kilometres south west of Onslow. The domestic gas plant will have a design capacity of 200 million standard cubic feet per day. A sales gas pipeline will be connected to the Dampier to Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline for sale to the domestic gas market in Western Australia.

Gorgon Project

The Gorgon Project is building a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) production facility on Barrow Island, 70kms off the Pilbara coast of Western Australia. It will be one of Australia’s single biggest developments with an estimated resource base of more than 40 trillion cubic feet of gas and a nominal development life of around 60 years.

Monadelphous

Information for this article has been provided by Monadelphous, a leading engineering group providing construction, maintenance and industrial services to the resources, energy and infrastructure sectors. There are currently many heavy construction jobs with Mondadelphous available in Australia. If you live in the UK you will have the opportunity to meet Mondelphous recruiters in person at the Energy, Mining & Engineering International Jobs Expo this summer (2012) in Leeds or London.

Heavy Construction Jobs in Australia

If you’re interested in moving to Australia and think you might have the right skills, you can find heavy construction roles in the construction jobs, mining and resources jobs and oil and gas jobs sections of the Working In Australia website.