The first floor of Ford Motor Co.’s BlueOval SK Battery Park. in Glendale, Kentucky, is about three-quarters of a mile long and has a total of 3.9 million square feet. The project team says the large electric vehicle battery production facility was built. in just 25 months it has required a lot of flexibility and agility.
Southfield, Mich.-based Barton Malow is the design-build contractor and construction manager for Ford and its joint venture partner, South Korean battery maker SK On Co. Together, they’ve led a team that peaked at around 3,800 craftsmen on site earlier this year, plus around 2,000 more working on process teams, with more than 11.5 million man hours in end of July
The first floor of the site measures about three-quarters of a mile in length.
Photo courtesy of Barton Malow
“We’re running a small town,” says Rich Bardelli, Ford’s manager of program planning and estimating.
The scope of the project includes the 43 GW capacity plant, along with the core and shell of a second 4.1 million square foot plant that Ford plans to complete at a later date, as well as 1 million square outbuildings in an area of 1,550 square meters. acre located off Interstate 65 about 50 miles south of Louisville, Ky.
Each storey building contains 40,000 tonnes of structural steel. The project also required so much concrete that it needed three batch plants running at one point, with its crew placing more than 400,000 cubic yards of concrete, according to Steven Freed, Barton Malow’s senior vice president. Much of the concrete was placed at night because with so many deliveries arriving daily there would not have been room for all the trucks.
While Ford has plenty of manufacturing experience, the $5.8 billion battery plants it’s building in Kentucky with SK On as a technology partner and another plant they’re collaborating on in the $5.6 billion BlueOval City project in Stanton, Tenn., have featured some differences from typical auto manufacturing.
A worker in the middle of a sea of steel.
Photo courtesy of Barton Malow
The plant includes 1.8 million square meters of clean room on its first two floors, which must meet air particle count, temperature and humidity requirements. Clean rooms have epoxy floors, and walls and ceilings are made of 4-inch to 6-inch-thick insulating panels.
“It can be compared to an operating room in a hospital,” says Aron Csont, project manager at Barton Malow.
Working with South Korean process equipment suppliers, the team couldn’t rely on assumptions about what types of utilities and routing it might need, says Michael Durand, senior vice president of Ghafari Associates, which designed the project. This meant that the planning and construction teams needed to speed up the process more than usual to ensure that everyone was informed about what was needed, which in turn helped the team to integrate and accelerate efforts.
An estimated 5.2 million cubic meters of earth were moved to prepare the site for the massive project.
Photo courtesy of Barton Malow
Early collaboration
Ghafari also worked on the design of BlueOval City, and Durand says there was a lot of early collaboration between the teams for the two projects.
“There are a lot of layoffs, a lot of people involved in each of these projects,” he says. “Having to repeat it two or three times to get some direction would have really loaded the schedule.”
The Kentucky team was also able to apply some lessons learned on the first floor to the second floor building. Grid space was standardized in the second building to ramp up completion faster and more cost-effectively, Bardelli says. The roof of the second building was also redesigned with concrete, which meant crews didn’t have to do the traditional fire retardant spray underneath. Freed says this saved a couple of months and avoided the “big mess that comes with fireproofing.”
“It was the first time in my career that the first purchase was for decks and we needed a huge amount.”
—Eric Grubb, director of New Footprint Construction, Ford
With hundreds of miles of piping inside the building, Eric Grubb, Ford’s director of new footprint construction, says extensive building information modeling was used to resolve conflicts between the MEP of the building and the process equipment to be able to change the positioning of equipment such as the large air treatment units. Workers also used a Dusty Robotics wheel design robot, which they were able to program with the locations of the interior wall and process equipment, and marked them on the floor, Csont says. For the exterior, they flew a drone over the site weekly to track progress. Csont says they looked at drone footage with BIM 4D programming for a side-by-side comparison.
“You could get pretty close to counting parts by zooming in and seeing where the progress was,” he says.
Planning was also complicated by long delivery times for electrical equipment and roofing material. Some equipment was ordered more than a year in advance.
“It was the first time in my career that the first purchase was for roofs,” says Grubb. “We needed a huge amount.”
About 40,000 tons of structural steel were built for each floor building.
Photo courtesy of Barton Malow
The conversations they planned to order materials were the start of frequent communications between the many team members. Big automakers like Ford have a lot of moving parts that go into something like launching a new electric vehicle, so it’s important for the team building the plant to meet their deadlines to allow production starts on time, says Grubb.
“We’re the first ones out the door,” he says. “We have to hit our date first to make sure they can make the batteries. We can’t be late.”
This communication has been carried out throughout the project. The team holds quarterly tripartite meetings with Ford, Barton Malow and union management to discuss the upcoming work and the number of workers that will be needed for craft classification. Team members meet weekly to discuss the schedule and update Ford leaders on progress, while meeting informally daily to discuss what’s happening on site.
“The steel is up, the siding is up, the roof is on. So there’s a fair amount of construction that’s already happened on the second building.”
—Steven Freed, Senior Vice President, Barton Malow
These meetings have been essential because of the scale of the project, with a difference of $1 per square foot adding millions of dollars in cost, not to mention the cost of having a large workforce that would be left without direction moving forward. “The worst thing you can do in any project, especially one of this magnitude, is not make decisions,” says Grubb. “You’ll waste a lot of money in a short time.”
The site itself presented some unusual challenges early on. The overall slope of the site dropped more than 25 feet, so a lot of cut and fill was needed to balance it out for the two buildings on the plant. A creek runs through the site, so Ford had the project’s engineering team begin designing to reroute it and contacted the US Army Corps of Engineers to clarify the plan They came up with a design for a “meandering stream” at the edge of the property. Durand says it was carefully thought out for the flow of water and included lots of plantings to make it a natural habitat.
“If you think about nature, nothing goes in a straight line,” says Grubb. “We can’t dig a trench down there to redirect it so it snakes. Every twist and turn of this thing was designed.”
Work continues as planned on the first floor and substantial completion is expected in a few weeks.
Photo courtesy of Barton Malow
Community benefits
The project team also met with local residents on ways to minimize impacts on them and provide more benefits to the community. When trees needed to be removed, the team took them to a nearby sawmill and gave payment to the local volunteer fire department. Crews replaced sidewalks and cut out parts where people had previously signed their names into the wet concrete and put them back in place with new concrete placed around them. The team also purchased new scoreboards and lighting for local ball fields and had workers repaint bathrooms and other facilities.
“We try to integrate into the community,” says Freed.
An estimated 3,800 artisans and 2,000 more working on processing equipment were on the job at the start of the year.
Photo courtesy of Barton Malow
Work has continued as planned and substantial completion of the first floor is expected in a few weeks. Team members are now obtaining temporary certificates of employment, with the process team testing production equipment. First production is scheduled for early next year.
As for the second plant, Ford has not yet announced when the company plans to complete it. Last October, John Lawler, Ford’s chief financial officer, told investors that the automaker and SK On decided to delay the second Kentucky battery plant as part of production adjustments to better meet vehicle demand. electric
It is another example of the team’s flexibility. Grubb says the builders were asked to stop the second plant at a point where it would be efficient to restart, so they built its core and shell. Because of the long delivery times of some equipment, they did not want to have to wait nine months for delivery, with part stored inside, adds Bardelli.
“The steel is up, the siding is up, the roof is on,” says Freed. “So there’s a fair amount of construction that’s already happened on the second building.”
