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PETROLEUM DIRECTORY: The Power of Collaboration Full service environmental and energy services company has depth of professionals Susan Braund Petroleum Directory Contributing Writer
ENSR is environmental consulting’s version of a genie in a bottle. Just make the request, and the exact expertise needed for any project appears, speedily. All ENSR offices operate with one unified philosophy: to provide rapid response and consistent service.
There’s a lot of energy and intelligence compressed into the ENSR International domain —1,400 professionals from 60 different disciplines operating in 100 different countries, speaking 40 different languages — providing single-source, cost-effective, comprehensive environmental solutions to private and public sector clients for more than 35 years.
In Alaska, ENSR has served oil and gas and other industries since 1977, providing a subset of services including environmental assessment and permitting, integrated site closure, site assessment/contamination cleanup and compliance management. Environmental assessment and permitting “We do the environmental assessment activities up front, from simple assessments on a specific project to bigger environmental impact statements,” says Chris Humphrey, ENSR Alaska general manager. “Our approach is state of the art — we develop some of the best impact statements going — hundreds of assessments every year.”
The Bureau of Land Management is currently preparing an amendment to the Northeast National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska Integrated Activity Plan/Environmental Impact Statement, which was completed in 1998. As BLM’s primary contractor, ENSR will be responsible for all major technical tasks in revamping the EIS, including scoping meetings and other public hearings and assisting BLM in responding to issues and public concerns. ENSR Alaska has unique capabilities in this area with an on-staff public participation specialist, Janet Wolf, who has more than 10 years of experience in issues associated with the NEPA/EIS and CERCLA public processes in Alaska.
The analysis area includes all of the BLM-administered lands in the Northeast NPR-A planning area, approximately 4.6 million acres. Under the current EIS, no oil and gas leasing is allowed in the northernmost 600,000 acres, which contains the highest oil and gas potential. Decisions made in the EIS are being revisited, and exploration and development opportunities that could provide access to significant new oil discoveries will be evaluated. Another reason for the amendment, according to BLM, is to consider changing the current stipulations so they more closely resemble the performance-based stipulations under development in the northwest portion of the NPR-A.
“We’re excited to be part of this top priority and nationally important project; we definitely want to contribute and play an instrumental role in what’s going on in North Slope development in Alaska,” comments Humphrey.
ENSR’s permitting activities often go hand in hand with EIS work, and the company demonstrates a depth of understanding of permitting issues and processes. ENSR has secured environmental permits in every one of the states, plus other countries, for complex project of many kinds. ENSR consultants negotiate with regulatory agencies throughout a project to resolve technical issues and develop favorable permit conditions.
“By anticipating and addressing permit requirements early on, we help our clients with a comprehensive permitting strategy, schedule and mitigation plans.”
“ENSR has worked the largest natural gas pipelines in the United States, from preparing FERC applications all the way to state and federal permits and construction oversight. We’ve been squarely focused on the Alaska natural gas pipeline for the last five years. It’s an important project to us and we’ve dedicated a lot of resources to do what we can to get it up and moving.” Integrated site closures Regarding site closures, going into contaminated sites and removing everything is not always the best thing to do, according to Humphrey. Using a risk-based analysis approach, ENSR determines the main issues, combining full assessment and remediation services in a comprehensive site closure strategy. ENSR can quickly draw on the expertise of its team of toxicologists, risk assessors, and a range of scientists to achieve regulatory site closures. Many ENSR staff who are not located in the state have Alaska experience. ENSR has conducted over 2,200 risk assessments worldwide.
Innovation is also key to ENSR’s site closure methodology. “We’ve worked with our clients and regulatory agencies on innovative risk-based approaches to reach agreements on closing sites based on actual risk to human health and the environment,” says Humphrey. “One result is development of an effective ecological risk assessment tool that evaluates residual petroleum sheen on water, a major Department of Environmental Conservation compliance point. This tool gets DEC and other agencies over the hump by assessing actual risk posed by sheen and allowing risk-based closure decisions.”
The company has performed site closure activities for all the majors on the North Slope at one point or another. A multiyear program involving inactive production reserve pits in Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk has resulted in closure approvals for reserve pits at over 40 drill sites to date. Site assessment and contamination cleanup ENSR’s site assessment and remediation process includes routine soil sampling and field screening. “These are baseline tasks that we’re very good at; we’re able to put people out on location and do sound site assessments and sampling with accurate and time-critical results. Last summer, for example, we put multiple crews on 22 communication sites along the TAPS,” says Humphrey. “We fast-tracked the project, did a lot of coordination of activities that would usually span a couple of seasons, doing site assessment and remediation simultaneously. This is a good example of our ability to put people at remote sites in short order, efficiently.”
When spill sites on the North Slope need to be remediated and closed, ENSR has the technologies to accomplish it quickly and efficiently. Once again innovation pays off.
“We are having very positive results with an oxygen-releasing compound that is new to North Slope usage,” says Humphrey. “It is a fast-acting oxygen enhancer that stimulates bioremediation in an environment that is frozen except for a couple of months a year.” Compliance management In the environmental compliance management arena, ENSR offers a wide umbrella of services for a variety of clients, including planning documents, oil spill contingency plans, environmental management systems, training, and environmental audits.
One current compliance project of interest, ENSR’s Jane Thomas has been assigned to audit cruise ships operating in Alaska, the Caribbean, Mexico, and other locations to determine each ship’s compliance with local, national, and international environmental regulations.
“We also have a lot of client activity regarding storm water pollution prevention and oil spill prevention to meet the regulations of the Clean Water Act,” says Humphrey. “We come up with best management practices to prevent runoff industrial chemicals and pollutants from entering streams and lakes.” Data management services As increasingly greater volumes of environmental data are required to understand environmental problems and attain regulatory compliance, ENSR has specialized in creating and finding the right tools to compile, analyze, and report large volumes of data. Tools such as web-based extranet sites allow the company to manage data in a collaborative process with its clients and other stakeholders to achieve project or program objectives.Well-deserved recognition ENSR won the Environmental Business Journal Gold Medal in 2001 and has twice been ranked in the top 10 in Engineering News Record magazine’s annual ranking of environmental companies that perform solely environmental work. This recognition and success will no doubt continue if ENSR sticks to its company principles: hire and retain talented and dedicated people, build enduring client relationships, and focus on continuous improvement and innovation.
Editor’s note: Susan Braund owns Firestar Media Services in Anchorage, Alaska.
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