Environmental regulations - New Mexico

New Mexico Business Journal, July, 1990 by Tom Sharpe

Environmental Regulations

The 1980s saw the rise of an entirely new industrial discipline aimed at reconciling economic development with environmental harmony. Once, the very idea of an "environmental consultant" would have touched off guffaws in the board room.

In 1985, 17 firms listed themselves as environmental consultants in Albuquerque.

Today, 43 claim the title in the Duke City alone with a bevy of others around the state.

"The environmental business is one of the most rapidly growing sectors of the economy, but this has been at a tremendous cost to existing businesses," says Alberto Gutierrez, president of Geoscience Consultants Ltd., the largest environmental consulting firm based in New Mexico.

Like many of his competitors in this booming field, Gutierrez, 35, technically educated (masters in geology at the University of New Mexico) and politically savvy (chairman of the state Environmental Improvement board from 1987 until last year), recognizes the impact in the field.

He founded Geoscience with Randy Hicks in 1982 and expects to gross $8.5 million this year, tackling environmental problems on a number of fronts. His firm will be performing tests to evaluate what impact a new project might have on the environment, shepherding entrepreneurs through minefields of bureaucratic and public relations obstacle, helping existing industries operate within standards and cleaning up contaminated sites.

Geoscience is currently working for General Electric in Albuquerque's South Valley where polluted groundwaters qualify it as one of New Mexico's 10 federal Superfund sites. GE's nearby jet engine plant isn't solely responsible for the solvent-saturated aquifer; the old Atomic Energy Commission and the U.S. Air Force previously occupied the site. Other companies, including the defunct Whitfield Tank Lines, have contributed to the problem, as have thousands of individual septic tanks.

Gutierrez figures it will take two years of design and 12 more of operations to pump all the polluted groundwater to the surface, run it through a treatment facility and return pure water to the ground.

Like in other burgeoning businesses, better mousetraps are endemic in environmental consulting. One Albuquerque firm thinks its invention may shrink both the time and costs of groundwater cleanups. Billings and Associates is patenting its Subsurface Volatilization and Ventilation System (SVVS), attracting attention from private sector for economy and from government regulators for effectiveness.

"In a nutshell, we inject heated air into groundwater and simultaneously withdraw vapors," explains Jeff Billings, vice president of the firm founded in 1981 by his father, Gale Billings, former dean of the Geological Sciences Department of New Mexico Tech at Socorro.

The SVVS process is in place at an old gasoline station south of Albuquerque where two old underground gasoline tanks leaked their contents into the ground. The owner said nine years of conventional techniques hardly had made a dent in the groundwater pollution, while only nine months of the SVVS process has brought it close to state compliance.

Billings says where other techniques could take 10 years and cost $1 million, SVVS will do the job in 18 months at a price of $180,000.

Billings employs a hydrologist, geochemist, a biologist, a geologist, a physicist, a chemical engineer, a registered nurse, a business administrator, a graphic artist and a psychologist.

"The different specialties represent what the earth is made up of, so this is a multi-disciplined business," says Malu Gawthrop, an environmental scientist and geologist with Jacobs Engineering, a $793-million-a-year, 8,000-employee international conglomerate founded as a standard engineering firm in Pasadena, Calif., in 1947.

In 1980, Jacobs entered both New Mexico and the environmental arena with a Department of Energy contract to stabilize radioactive uranium tailings waste near Grants.

Meanwhile, the Rodey, Dickason, Sloan, Akin & Robb law firm recently established an environmental legal department, and has published a state environmental law handbook.

Most people associate environmental laws with the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the state Environmental Improvement Division (EID). But the reality encompasses a larger swath of bureaucracy.

The petroleum industry, for example, starts at the wellhead, with the Oil Conservation Division of the state Energy Minerals & Natural Resources Department and the state engineer.

Moving oil and its byproducts to the refinery can involve the federal Department of Transportation and the emergency response unit of the state Department of Public Safety. Selling the refined products can involve the Department of Energy, the state Regulation and Licensing Department, city and county health or environmental bureaus and others.

Few large property acquisitions are consummated these days without an environmental assessment. Jamieson K. Deuel, president of Deuel & Associates, says buyers want to know if the buildings have asbestos, if there are leaking underground storage tanks, if there are PCBs in the electronic capacitors and transformers, and if the underground water table has been polluted.