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Competition is heating up among major engineering and construction companies chasing a piece of major oil, mining and government projects in Alaska.One indicator is the return of Fluor Corp., a global engineering heavyweight setting up shop in a new Midtown office tower. The Irving, Texas, firm, which once had a major presence here helping build the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, already has 20 people working in Anchorage and aims to have up to 70 by next summer.Major Fluor competitors also have been making moves locally.On Monday, URS Corp. of San Francisco announced it had taken over most of the assets of Tryck Nyman Hayes Inc., a 60-person Anchorage engineering firm with experience on highway, bridge, port and rail projects.And last year, CH2M Hill of Englewood, Colo., greatly expanded its Alaska presence with the takeover of Veco Corp., the Anchorage oil-field services company whose former executives are at the heart of the federal government's prosecution of Alaska politicians on bribery and other corruption charges.Fluor, URS and CH2M Hill are all major international engineering and construction players, each raking in billions of dollars in revenue last year.Alaska's oil fields are humming on the strength of crude running well north of $100 a barrel, and proposed megaprojects such as a $30 billion natural gas pipeline and the Donlin Creek and Pebble gold mines drawing a lot of buzz, said Neal Fried, a state labor economist."The biggest beneficiaries are these types of engineering and construction firms," he said.Companies like Fluor typically pay high wages to employees, and while the 70 Fluor jobs won't in themselves make much of a ripple in the local economy, they signal a wider positive trend, Fried said.A visit Thursday to Fluor's second-floor suite in the new JL Tower revealed rows of prim but still-vacant work cubicles.Company executives held an open house Wednesday evening and said it attracted dozens of potential customers, including major oil companies BP, Conoco Phillips, Exxon Mobil and Shell. People from two pipeline companies also came -- Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., which runs the 800-mile trans-Alaska oil line, and Denali, the new BP-Conoco partnership proposing a gas line.Fluor already has one major contract, but company managers declined to name the client.Brian Tomlinson, Fluor's new Alaska general manager, is practically an old sourdough, having worked two prior hitches here dating to 1974, when he was a manager on the epic oil pipeline construction and then shifted to a late 1970s Alaska gas pipeline project that never materialized.Tomlinson, 57, most recently managed a billion-dollar refinery upgrade in Spain.Aside from the pipeline, Fluor has worked on major oil-field expansion projects in Alaska as well as the missile defense project at Fort Greely.The company has 46,000 employees worldwide and made $533 million in profit on revenue of $16.7 billion last year.Michael Pears, a Fluor senior vice president, said the Anchorage office will manage projects, but will farm out much of the engineering and other work to staff based elsewhere such as Houston or Calgary. He said that's a different approach from competitors.Pears said no specific project, such as the gas pipeline, prompted Fluor to open an office here. Rather, the company is expanding in places such as Moscow, Singapore and Buenos Aires where its clients are making big investments, and Anchorage is among that group, he said."A hundred dollars a barrel drives a lot of projects," Pears said.