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CEO's Message
JWI is expanding our services. In June we sent a
team to the Middle East to evaluate environmental
conditions at military facilities. Our team has
completed the initial surveys and returned safely.
The consensus was "Hot, sandy, and windy."
Also in June, JWI was selected to be in the ANSI
nation-wide pilot program for Green House Gas verifiers.
JWI will be auditing and verifying the GHG emissions
reported by industry.
We are also adding clients that need assistance in
reporting their GHG emissions.
I hope this newsletter finds you healthy and happy.
If there is any way I or the JWI team can assist you,
please let me know.
Regards,
Peter W. Johnson
President and CEO
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Johnson
Wright, Inc.
3687 Mt. Diablo Blvd.
Suite 330
Lafayette, CA 94549
Office: (925) 403-6200
Fax: (925) 284-3065
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Green
Buildings: Better for the Environment and
Better for Business
By Paul Nuti
The
climate change issue is heating up and the level
of regulation is rising. Many cities,
including San Francisco, New York and Washington
D.C., are requiring that new construction projects
go green. As the country moves farther down
the road of green development everyone wants to
know, can green building save money and the
environment? The U.S. Green Building Council
commissioned a report to evaluate performance of
LEEDŽ for new construction building projects and
to compare their performance to a standard
building. The report was published in
March 2008 and the news for green building is
good.
The report concludes that LEED buildings are
out-performing standard buildings in a number of
areas. LEED buildings show overall energy
savings and higher LEED certification levels are
showing energy improvements over lower
certification levels.[1] The study also
found some areas needing improvement. There
were some projects that performed poorly when
compared to the modeled standard indicating the
green design has further to go. The report
also suggested that the methodology to compare
"standard" to "green" be
further evaluated. The bottom line is that
energy efficiency is happening through green
design.
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Implications
of Emerging Contaminants on Site Cleanup Costs
By
Alborz Wozniak
Under
the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), the United
States Environmental Protection Agency  (USEPA)
is required to identify, review, and evaluate
potential contaminants that may be present in
drinking water for regulatory decision-making.
The list of potential contaminants of concern
that may be present in drinking water sources
(e.g. groundwater) are referred to as
Contaminant Candidate List (CCL). By law,
the USEPA is required to publish a CCL every
five years. The latest draft list which
was published in February 2008, contained 93
chemicals and 11 microbes. Eventually, the
USEPA will make a determination on whether to
regulate these "emerging" contaminants
or not. Examples of recent emerging
contaminants that are on the CCL include methyl
tert-butyl ether (MTBE), perchlorate,
1,2,3-trichloropropane (1,2,3-TCP), and N-nitrosodimethylamine
(NDMA).
State water quality regulators and the water
entities responsible for extraction, treatment
and supply of drinking water that are required
to comply with federal and state drinking water
regulations monitor the Nation's water supplies
for the emerging contaminants as part of the
information gathering process to support the
USEPA's CCL policy making process. In
addition, the water purveyors are required by
law to monitor and report to the public if these
emerging contaminants are present in their water
supplies. These regulatory requirements
coupled with the lack of adequate information
regarding the potential health effects of the
chemicals have created uncertainty and concern
over the potential long-term liability posed by
these contaminants to the water purveyors.
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More
NORM Claims on the Horizon?
Background
NORM is the acronym for Naturally Occurring
Radioactive Material. One source of NORM
is oil and gas production. While the oil
and gas that is
extracted from a formation is not radioactive,
the water that is also present in these
formations often contains low levels of the
radionuclide radium-226 (Ra-226), which is of
the Uranium 238 decay series. During
extraction of the oil and gas, formation water
is also extracted. As this water is
brought to the surface, some of the dissolved
radium precipitates out in solid form.
Most commonly, the radium co-precipitates with
barium sulfate, a hard and relatively insoluble
scale deposit. While the levels of
radioactivity are insignificant in the formation
water, the scale build-up in the pipes
concentrates the radioactivity. This
process, analogous to bio-accumulation, is
referred to as Technologically-Enhanced
Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material (TENORM).
Grefer
Joseph Grefer and his family leased a 33-acre
tract of Louisiana industrial property for
decades to Intercoastal Tubular Services Inc. (ITCO),
a company that cleaned and stored used oil
drilling pipes for ExxonMobil. In 1986,
ExxonMobil learned that some of the pipes
contained low levels of naturally occurring
radioactive material (NORM), but allowed the
pipes to remain at the site in Harvey, La.,
until operations ceased in 1992. A lawsuit
was subsequently filed.
In 2001 a Louisiana state court jury awarded the
Grefers $56 million in compensatory damages and
$1 billion in punitive damages for radioactive
contamination caused by the oil company
(ExxonMobil Corp. v. Grefer). The punitive
award was later reduced to $112 million by the
Louisiana Court of Appeals. On April 21,
2008 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an
appeal from ExxonMobil Corp. over the $112
million in punitive damages.
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The
Latest Evolution of NRD
By
Michael Marsden
Natural
resource damages (NRD) has been part of the
environmental liability reality for nearly 30 yrs.
NRD has evolved slowly over the years, but those
changes have been significant. At the
forefront of these changes has been the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as a
federal trustee under the Department of Commerce
(DOC). Back in the mid-1990s NOAA introduced a
fundamental change in NRD assessment process
shifting away from the traditional economic-based
valuation of NRD claims (developed by the
Department of the Interior in the mid-80s) to a
resource-based valuation process (using a Habitat
Equivalency Analysis). NOAA is now making a
shift in the timing and the funding of the NRD
process relative to site investigation and
cleanup. This shift could significantly
impact where the money comes from to pay NRD
assessments.
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