The village of Voorheesville in Albany County. Photo: TrudiJ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Atlas Copco Comptec is hiring in Voorheesville. The compressor maker has finished a high-bay addition at its plant there and says demand is strong enough to grow its workforce to about 340 people.
General manager Tony Sardella told the Albany Business Review in a story published Sunday that the plant’s order book is at an all-time high, and the company is ramping up hiring now that the new space is running. The paper put the cost of the project at $32.8 million.
What the addition does
Atlas Copco Comptec has engineered and built compressors at its 45-acre Voorheesville site since 1980. It is part of the Gas and Process division of Sweden’s Atlas Copco Group. The new space, about 63,000 square feet according to the company’s announcement, was built to handle much larger machines than the plant could easily make before. It has multiple overhead cranes and hoists for heavier lifts, upgraded testing areas and more room for warehousing and shipping.
The plant makes integrally geared centrifugal compressors and turboexpanders, heavy equipment used in natural gas processing, liquefied natural gas, carbon capture and storage, industrial gases and industrial heat pumps. The company said the addition lets it handle the whole engineer-to-order process, from design to delivery, in the United States. Its largest compressors for carbon capture can now be built in Albany County, county officials said.
“This expansion is built with the future in mind,” Sardella said in the company’s release, crediting employees for carrying the plant through the construction.
Atlas Copco held an inauguration at the plant in late October with executives from its compressor business area and the Gas and Process division. The company said the space was already fully in use.
The public money behind it
Albany County and the Advance Albany County Alliance, the county’s economic development arm, helped pay for the project. In its announcement of the ribbon cutting, the Alliance listed a $475,000 Sustainable Technology and Green Energy (STAGE) grant toward construction and $4.2 million in combined assistance through the Albany County Industrial Development Agency.
The county’s figures differ a little from the company’s. The Alliance described a $40 million, 65,000-square-foot expansion that would add 55 jobs at full capacity and keep 248 existing ones. County Executive Daniel McCoy said the project would bring in $1.16 million in additional tax revenue over the next decade, shared by the Voorheesville Central School District and local governments.
Alliance CEO Kevin O’Connor called the company an example of building on local strengths and said its investment shows confidence in the county’s workforce.
Part of a run of foreign-owned expansions
The county has been pitching foreign direct investment this fall. The same announcement pointed to two other projects that drew more than $3 million in county help over two months: Belgian heavy-cargo company Aprojects Americas, which is expanding its U.S. headquarters at the Port of Coeymans, and German-owned NSH USA Corp., which received a $908,000 STAGE grant commitment for a $12 million manufacturing building at its Menands campus that supports 137 jobs.
Atlas Copco Group says it runs more than 160 locations in the U.S., including 26 production, remanufacturing and distribution sites, and employs more than 7,500 people nationwide. The Voorheesville plant is one of the division’s production centers alongside sites in Germany, India, China and Korea.
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