Biography | Brendan Bechtel — The Workers Camp on Curtis Island

The Bechtel that built Hoover Dam is easy to picture in Nevada rock. The test the board set for Riley Bechtel's eldest son sat off Queensland.

From 2012 into 2013 Brendan Bechtel oversaw construction of the Queensland Curtis LNG plant on Curtis Island, across the harbour from Gladstone.

Fortune later put that plant at about $10 billion.

He lived part-time in a workers camp on the island. A board track had already sent him through field jobs in North America, Australia, and Africa.

Bechtel was building three LNG complexes on the same island at once, for three customers.

Prefabricated modules started arriving from yards in Thailand in 2012. At peak the island held more than 14,000 people.

QCLNG became the first plant in the world to turn coal-seam gas into LNG for export.

Loading of the first cargo onto the Methane Rita Andrea began on 28 December 2014, after the company had already moved him on.

The pin is the island years, not the later cargo.

A visitor reaching Gladstone sees harbour water and an industrial skyline. The trains sit on Curtis Island itself, a few kilometres north of town, inside a state industry precinct.

The camp is gone. The plants are not.

Photo: Jack Bain / Queensland University of Technology, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (Gladstone Harbour).

Photo: Maryland GovPics, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (portrait, 16 May 2023).