For all the talk about the impact of the ethane cracker Shell is building, there hasn’t been much of an update on the construction in the press. If you have driven by it this summer you may not notice much of a difference, at least to the naked eye, but there is significant progress nonetheless. A massive concrete pour is well underway. Champion Concrete’s batch plant up the Ohio is producing non-stop and there are more than 200 ironworkers on site to handle the rebar tying for what is the pad for the billion dollar process plant to be floated up river from the Gulf of Mexico.  The site will see mostly horizontal construction in 2017 but construction of related buildings will begin in about a year. Right now Great Arrow Builders has a package that includes and administration building and medical/fire station facility totaling about 84,000 square feet out-to-bid, due Aug. 18. A lab building was also just released to bid Sept. 14.

There was an interesting spotting of an autonomous research vehicle on McKnight Road last week that is not an Uber car. The Ford pictured below uses different Lidar/capture technology than Uber’s. Since Ford is a billion-dollar investor in Argo AI, I assume this is one of their vehicles. No announcement of where Argo intends to locate its 120,000 +/- first offices has been made yet.

In other project news, BRIDGES & Co. was awarded the $12 million Northland Heights senior living facility, which is the conversion Hamister Development is undertaking of a former hotel on McKnight Road. PJ Dick’s special projects group started construction on the $3 million Keystone Shooting Center in Marshall Township. Massaro was awarded the $4 million Mercy Hopsital central sterile facility. Massaro was also selected as the CM for the $26 million AGH Cancer Institute project. IKM was chosen as the architect.