Award of the project
The Mexican government issued tender documents to the bidders for the Samalayuca II project in May 1991. Bids were submitted in March 1992 by three groups, one led by General Electric (GE), another by ABB and the third by Westinghouse. GE was joined in the winning consortium by Bechtel, El Paso Natural Gas, Grupo ICA and Coastal Corporation, a pipeline company. Later, Bechtel established its InterGen subsidiary and participated through it, while El Paso Natural Gas participated through El Paso Energy International.
Grupo ICA was an investor and ICA Fluor Daniel was a contractor with Bechtel and GE
Power Systems. The publicly traded Grupo ICA is the largest construction company in Mexico and one of the largest in Latin America. It sold a 50 per cent interest in ICA Industrial, a subsidiary that constructs power plants and similar projects, to Fluor Daniel. Coastal was the fifth partner at the time that the contract was awarded. Coastal had intended to build a pipeline to supply natural gas to the project, but this plan was modified to a joint venture with El Paso Energy and Pemex Gas y Petroquimica Basica (Pemex), the Mexicanstate-owned energy company, to accommodate the Pemex monopoly on pipelines in Mexico.