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PETROLEUM DIRECTORY: ENSR helps the oil industry protect the environment Company’s multi-disciplinary team provides a range of environmental services for the oil industry in Alaska and throughout the world
By Alan Bailey PNA Contributing Writer
Protecting the environment has developed into a specialized business requiring experience, knowledge and creativity. Careful planning during the design of new development projects can prevent pollution and environmental damage during and after construction. Modern techniques such as risk-based evaluation enable the safe cleanup of sites that have become contaminated in the past.
ENSR International, an environmental consulting firm with more than 60 offices worldwide, provides services in environmental planning, environmental assessment, permitting, compliance management and contamination cleanup.
ENSR started operating in Alaska in the 1970s in the early years of Prudhoe Bay development. The company’s Alaska staff of about 30 people has accumulated many years of experience in dealing with environmental issues in Alaska.
“Compliance management is a big part of our environmental services,” Chris Humphrey, general manager of ENSR in Alaska told PNA, “both the up-front preventative, the planning part of it and then the corrective actions.” Contaminated site closure Humphrey takes particular pride in the progress that ENSR has made in dealing with contaminated sites. “A big strength of ours is dealing with the whole spectrum of contaminated sites from assessing the problem, developing and implementing a solution … to ultimately attain regulatory closure approval,” Humphrey said.
ENSR’s team of experts develops a risk-based approach to a site. “The approaches are tailored to the specific site conditions, regulatory program and, most importantly, the clients objectives,” Humphrey said. “What we do is evaluate the level of those risks and present an approach and assessment of those risks that can be used as a tool for closing the site.”
By ensuring that the risks fit within acceptable levels, it is possible to work with the regulatory agencies to close a site, even if contamination levels may exceed the standard limits. It’s all a question of what makes practical sense at a particular location.
ENSR’s work with Phillips and BP in closing North Slope reserve pits has proved particularly successful. ENSR has been involved in the reserve pit closure program since the early 1990s, re-evaluating existing cleanup systems, as well as applying new risk-based approaches. “In the past three years we’ve effectively worked through and have gained closure approval with our clients on over 30 of those pits,” Humphrey said. Environmental planning Although polluted sites need to be cleaned up, it is even more important to prevent new pollution from happening. Environmental planning and management now form critical components of facility design and construction: specialists assist with the design of structures, in order to anticipate any environmental problems.
“The front-end activities for, say, a capital project would be doing an environmental assessment of what the impacts are going to be as a result of this project, and then working to develop various alternatives for how that project should be done,” Humphrey said. In some cases, ENSR will prepare an environmental impact statement for the project.
“As the engineering develops we’re typically involved in brainstorming ideas … if you add this piece of equipment, for example, what are the impacts on air quality,” Humphrey said.
ENSR demonstrated its expertise during the renovation of the primary runway at the Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks. “We were able to work the environmental assessment process in parallel with the design and construction guys, and ultimately get the assessment approved so the work could be constructed without any time delays and impacts to the client’s mission,” Humphrey said. Permitting Environmental permitting also needs to take place early in a construction project. ENSR provides expertise in developing and securing permits and is an industry leader in pipeline permitting. “The company is currently permitting some of the largest gas pipelines going on in the nation,” Humphrey said.
As an adjunct to its planning and permitting services, ENSR can assist with the public relations aspects of the regulatory process. Often a client has to go through a public process in order to gain public approval and acceptance on a proposed action that may include actions such as new construction, site cleanup, etc. “What we do is … digest … all the technical stuff, and boil it down to a package that can easily be presented and understood to the public — we’ve been doing that a lot for our military clients,” Humphrey said. Compliance management However, day-to-day compliance management of operating facilities forms a major component of ENSR’s services in Alaska. Environmental compliance often requires on-going monitoring of factors such as air, soil and water quality associated with permitting conditions, compliance agreements or voluntary initiatives. Similarly, a business will often want to evaluate the performance of its environmental systems. ENSR teams can perform the necessary monitoring of activities and do environmental sampling. “That is a bigger chunk of our business in Alaska, and has been for many years,” Humphrey said.
Access to sites for doing the sampling and environmental assessment poses the same logistical challenges that face any business operating in the remoter parts of Alaska. ENSR has more than 24 years of experience working in all parts of the state.
Gaining access to the regulators can also prove challenging at present: the agencies have been reducing their staffing levels for several years. Delays in the permitting process can cause serious problems for a construction project. Business challenges Changes in company and oilfield ownership have also presented some recent challenges for ENSR. In particular, ENSR has had to maintain an understanding of the evolving needs of the industry, while the ownership changes have worked their way through the various organizations. “I think our key to getting through it was understanding, whoever the client is, what their needs are and spending time with them up front,” Humphrey said.
And business attention has continued to focus on cost efficiency without sacrificing environmental protection. “Even though in Alaska the oil prices are high and there’s a lot of development activities, there is a very high emphasis on doing right both from an environment perspective and from a health and safety perspective,” Humphrey said.
But with environmental costs coming right from the bottom line, the Alaska oil industry needs to remain cost competitive with other parts of the world. “We know that the environmental aspect of a company’s bottom line is … a non-revenue generator,” Humphrey said, “and so, managing that cost is very important to our clients.” We make sure that we understand our clients’ objectives and then develop solutions,” he said. A multi-disciplinary team Humphrey told PNA that ENSR’s multi-discipline approach ensures a high-quality but cost-effective approach to meeting clients’ needs. “We’ve got a well-balanced mix of engineers, geologists, biologists, chemists and toxicologists,” he said. “I think that’s another strong value we bring to our clients.”
And ENSR’s Alaska team forms just one piece of a larger international company. Worldwide, the company possesses a great depth of experience. “We are part of a very successful international business and we, as a company, have the ability to apply those international resources to the Alaska challenges,” Humphrey said.
The increasing awareness of environmental issues throughout the world seems certain to ensure that environmental expertise will remain a critical requirement for the oil industry. ENSR has established a strong position to provide environmental services to companies wherever they operate.
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