Introduction
It's Time For a Change
After having worked on in situ remediation projects for over 20 years, I’ve decided to focus all my attention to helping responsible parties, regulators, consultants, and attorneys make investments in in situ remediation that result in a positive remediation return on investment (RORI). I’ve seen projects with high remediation performance expectations fail for the following reasons:
Characterization
Lack of understanding of contaminant flux or mass distribution for effective targeting to achieve contact and residence time for effective treatment.
Even when high resolution characterization is performed, the inability to transfer this knowledge into actionable and targeted remediation plans.
Design
Selection of chemistries based on bench scale testing versus what chemistries will work best in site lithology based on contaminant mass distribution, persistence, and residence time, is often the root cause of not meeting expectations.
Too often liquid amendments are injected into fine grained soils or conversely solid amendments into coarse grained soils. Then when it comes to heterogeneous sites, there is greater confusion on how to best approach.
Injection
At the end of the day, if the above considerations are adequately addressed, injection is usually the most critical component to achieving results, but often treated like a commodity field service with no true oversight of what is actually accomplished in the field.
Today most traditional injection contractors are trying to win work and then implement as cost effectively as possible to achieve a reasonable margin.
Summary
In situ remediation takes considerable investments and time to meet regulatory or internal business expectations. Our industry is not very well regulated as to the quality of the remediation being performed. No one provides bullet-proof guarantees, or should they be expected to, for their designs, chemistries, or field implementation services.
As a result, and in my opinion, much of the hundreds of millions that have been invested, often quite foolishly, have not moved the needle forward towards cleaning up sites and limiting risk and liability.
Based on my experience, I can help you ensure every dollar invested in remediation is benchmarked against realistic results and that the designs, approaches, chemistries and injection contactors are providing you the best value and chance of success. There is too much money at stake not to get this right, and after over 20 years of doing the same thing, it is time for change.