EIM Software to Manage Hydro Fracturing Data

Locus Technologies has expanded its flagship product EIM to manage data and information for natural gas exploration and production sites that use hydro fracturing technologies to extract gas from shale.

The relatively new drilling method for natural gas extraction — known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — carries significant environmental risks. It involves injecting large amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up rock formations and release the gas. Anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of the water sent down the well during hydrofracking returns to the surface, carrying drilling chemicals, very high levels of salts and, at times, naturally occurring radioactive material. According to recent NY Times article, there were more than 493,000 active natural-gas wells in the United States in 2009, almost double the number in 1990. Around 90 percent have used hydrofracking to get more gas flowing, according to the drilling industry.

For the natural gas industry to stay in compliance with ever stricter laws to protect drinking water supplies and air emissions, drilling companies need software tools to organize hydrofracking waste data in order to demonstrate to the public and regulators that hydrofracking activities are not endangering natural resources. They also need to prove that any dangerous waste from the wells is handled in compliance with state and federal laws. Although hydrofracking has been used for decades, the technology has become more powerful and more widely used in recent years, producing far more wastewater and attracting much more public and regulatory scrutiny.

Nearly all of the activities associated with hydrocracking, including the assessment of site characteristics, the ongoing monitoring of site conditions and air emissions, and the remediation of adverse environmental impacts, involve the collection and/or analysis of large quantities of data. The specialized software to organize, manage, validate, visualize, store, and report this information formerly did not exist until Locus expanded its award winning, web-based EIM software to provide industry with the necessary tools to do so.

This expanded module in EIM was specifically designed to meet the hydrofracturing industry’s needs for managing subsurface and water quality data that include both analytical chemistry, waste, and radionuclides. Since EIM has been deployed in the Cloud for over ten years at many similar oil and gas exploration sites and nuclear facilities nationwide, the system provides for rapid deployment, an unmatched level of functionality and data security, an extensive set of QC/QC standards, and scalability.

The hydrofracking industry has been in the spotlight in recent months and Locus wanted to provide this business sector with a tool to prove its case to the public and regulators that natural gas production using hydrofacking can be done safely and transparently. As such, we expanded our software offerings to manage and visualize water, waste, wastewater, drilling fluids, radionuclides and air emissions more effectively over the web.  We felt that the market needed an off-the-shelf tool targeted to manage hydrofracking data, being that is subject to a different set of state and federal regulatory guidance. Locus’s software provides any natural gas production site that has a need for data management and reporting—and almost all have—the necessary functionality to meet these requirements.

Water quality and waste management are not the only issues at hydrofracking sites. Air pollution caused by natural-gas drilling is a growing threat, too. Locus ePortal software when combined with EIM provides a comprehensive compliance solution for the natural gas industry to manage contaminants in all media ( water, soil, and air) in a single, integrated  system through a Single Sign On (SSO).

EIM, Locus’ Environmental Information Management software, is the world’s largest commercial on-demand environmental data management system. EIM completely replaces existing stand-alone data systems and reporting tools to provide a comprehensive integrated solution to one of the environmental industries’ most vexing problems – the centralization and management of complex data pertaining to contaminated water, groundwater, soil, and/or air. EIM provides for the complete electronic processing of analytical data, beginning with the upload of electronic data deliverables from labs, and terminating in state-mandated or federal regulatory exports and reporting. EIM is deployed through Software as a Service (SaaS) model that eliminates most of the difficulties associated with the adoption of a new technology, while offering the opportunity for more rapid customization to meet the ever-changing needs of its user population. The system currently stores over 120 million records for over 15,000 sites worldwide.

CR Magazine – Radioactive Data Tsunami

Environmental Business Journal Recognizes Locus Technologies for Achievements in Growth and Sustainability Offerings

Locus Technologies will be honored at the Environmental Industry Summit IX Hotel Del Coronado, Calif., March 9, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 22 February 2011  — Environmental Business Journal (EBJ), a business research publication that provides strategic business intelligence for the environmental industry, announced the winners of its 2010 Business Achievement awards.

Locus Technologies is pleased to announce that it was chosen to receive the EBJ award for business achievement among IT companies.

“Although 2010 was a difficult year, there was some noteworthy business activity in the environmental industry in 2010,” said Grant Ferrier, president of Environmental Business International Inc. (EBI), who singled out renewable energy development, environmental information technology, remediation, and mergers and acquisitions as growth areas.

The journal announced the winners in a recent issue, and representatives of the winning companies will be recognized during a special ceremony at EBI’s upcoming Environmental Industry Summit IX in Coronado, Calif., on March 9, 2011.

Locus Technologies was recognized for introducing several product enhancements and adding new clients in 2010. Over the past year, many of the firm’s Environmental Information Management (EIM) customers expanded their deployments of Locus into operations data management, using strategic business intelligence tools to maintain environmental compliance, manage organizational change, track sustainability, and respond to upcoming environmental requirements, including GHG reporting and resource management. To meet this demand, last year Locus rolled out an upgraded ePortal computing platform and added enhanced compliance, resource management, and air modules.

The firm signed multiple new customers in the nuclear (Exelon and Southern California Edison) and fossil-fuel power generation sectors, and increased its ePortal compliance platform use by 400 percent. Locus also added over 30 new customers for GHG services, including companies such as Ameresco, Stanford University, General Chemical, Lehigh Cement, United Airlines, and U.S. Pipe & Foundry.

In November, Locus’ water footprint and spatial analysis capability was recognized by software industry research analyst Gartner, and in December Locus obtained a second layer of SAS70 certification for its cloud computing operations.

To read about the EBJ awards.

 

ABOUT EBI
Founded in 1988, Environmental Business International Inc. (EBI, San Diego, Calif.) is a research, publishing and consulting company that specializes in defining emerging markets and generating strategic market intelligence for companies, investors and policymakers. EBI publishes Environmental Business Journal®, the leading provider of strategic information for the environmental industry, and Climate Change Business Journal®, which covers nine segments of the Climate Change Industry. EBI also performs contract research for the government and private sector and owns the Environmental Industry Summit, an annual three-day event for executives in the environmental industry.

Water Quality: EPA to Modify Chemical Limits for Perchlorate and Chromium 6 in Drinking Water

On Wednesday, February 2, 2011, the Obama administration outlined a more aggressive approach to curbing levels of certain chemicals in drinking water, saying it will develop a legal nationwide maximum for one chemical and signaling a separate effort to set new limits for other substances.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced that they would be moving from an advisory guideline to a mandatory limit for perchlorate, a chemical often associated with rocket fuel. The EPA also will be advancing a separate effort to set new limits for 16 other chemicals in drinking water. The Agency is particularly concerned about the substance known as chromium 6, or hexavalent chromium.

More recently, laboratory tests commissioned by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group found chromium 6 in tap water from 31 of 35 U.S. cities, with the highest levels in Norman, Okla.; Honolulu; and Riverside, Calif.

The EPA move to set its first-ever perchlorate standard comes after years of bureaucratic struggle with the Defense Department. A 2010 Government Accountability Office report found that 53 Defense Department installations had perchlorate at levels above a current advised limit of 15 parts per billion.

The Defense Department has already taken action beyond initial sampling at 48 of the 53 facilities, including some steps to remediate any contamination.

A group that includes defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. and perchlorate maker American Pacific Corp. challenged the EPA in a press release later Wednesday, saying that so far, no research has shown an adverse effect in humans exposed to perchlorate. The group, calling itself the Perchlorate Information Bureau, also said that perchlorate hadn’t shown up in public drinking water at levels that represent a public-health risk.

The problem could be present at more Defense Department sites than currently are being monitored, if the EPA decides that an even tougher standard is warranted. The NRDC says that a level of one part per billion is appropriate, compared with the EPA’s current advisory level of 15 parts per billion. Regulators have been studying perchlorate for more than a decade. California first required public water systems to monitor for the chemical in 1999.

 

Locus Receives SAS 70 Certification

Locus Cloud Computing Environmental Software Platform SAS 70 Certified

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 18 January 2011 — Locus Technologies, the industry leader in web-based environmental compliance and information management software, announced that it has been certified as compliant with the Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70: Service Organizations (SAS 70).

Locus passed an in-depth audit of its control objectives activities pertaining to database management and information technology. The certification places Locus in a rare category among environmental data management providers to have attained the rigorous classification. In today’s risk-management environment, it is essential that service providers like Locus demonstrate that they have adequate controls and safeguards in place so customers can be confident that their data are safe.

“By becoming SAS 70 certified, Locus shows that we are not only in compliance with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, but that we hold the security of our customers’ data paramount,” said Dr. Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus Technologies.

“Whether your environmental data are currently hosted by another provider, or you’re searching for a company to manage your data, your company should demand evidence that your data are safe and protected by a highly controlled process. We are pleased to know that our customers’ environmental data for water, sustainability, emissions, and greenhouse gas data have been deemed to be in full compliance with SAS 70,” continued Duplan.

In addition to being SAS 70 certified, Locus requires that its key suppliers also comply with SAS 70 standards. For example, Locus’ data center and cloud hosting provider have been certified recently to have processes and safeguards in place. These safeguards are designed to protect Locus’ assets and data that reside in the company’s managed hosting services data center. A service auditor’s examination—performed in accordance with SAS No. 70 Type II—is widely recognized because it confirms that a service organization has been through an in-depth audit of its control objectives and activities, which includes controls over information technology services and related processes.

Completion of the SAS 70 Type II examination of Locus’ managed hosting data center proves that an independent accounting and auditing firm has formally evaluated the company’s processes, procedures, and controls. The examination included controls related to service delivery, support services, security, monitoring, change management, data backup, environmental controls, and logical and physical access.

SAS 70 is designated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as an acceptable method for an organization’s management to obtain assurance about a third-party service organization’s internal controls without conducting a separate assessment.

As the world’s most comprehensive on-demand software for organizing environmental data and information, Locus is the partner of choice for all organizations that seek a credible and cost-effective solution to their energy and environmental management and reporting needs.

Locus Introduces Augmented Reality to Integrated Portal for Environmental, Energy, Water, Resource, and Emissions Management

Locus Expands ePortal to Address a Growing Need for Environmental Enterprise Resource Planning (EERP)

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 6 December 2010  — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental compliance and information management software, announced today new and expanded features and functionalities of ePortal, its award winning software platform for environmental and energy information management. This fifth generation version of the platform introduces a new Rich Internet Application (RIA)-based user interface that provides enhanced usability, improved work flows, and Augmented Reality (AR).

ePortal now provides customers with a single integrated portal platform to capture, organize, visualize, and report all key facility environmental information in a central, enterprise database offered in the cloud. The platform enables simplified work flows and advanced visualization that includes AR to create individualized views of information across media and resources. With the use of the ePortal software clients can manage all aspects of their regulatory compliance, energy and water usage, water quality, air emissions, GHG reporting, health and safety and much more. In short, ePortal provides the most advanced approach to the complex EERP challenges that face many companies today.

Locus’ ePortal is built around the familiar Conceptual Site Model (CSM). By design, CSM is multidisciplinary and encompasses both legacy and ongoing information about a site or facility. It can be viewed as a cube drawn around a site, part of which is underground and part above ground. All relevant inputs to and outputs from the cube are monitored and recorded. On the input side, utilities such as electricity, gas, and water, and raw materials are tracked. Outputs include air, water, and soil discharges and waste. Equipment within the cube such as boilers, stacks, tanks, and so forth become assets that have various attributes that must be recorded, stored, and often reported on.

For companies that adopt ePortal, it becomes the enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard for managing the many aspects of the sustainable enterprise. It synthesizes and crystallizes what is already known about a site or facility and augments that information with ongoing monitoring and reporting. Companies are able to report and forecast the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in real time across multiple hierarchical views. ePortal brings Augmented Reality to CSM.

Using Locus’ CSM-based approach, clients can take a more holistic view of their enterprise, enabling them to reduce both their compliance expenditures and their operational costs. In particular, ePortal provides enterprise tools to reduce and optimize consumption of various resources to lower GHG emissions and encourage more sustainable growth. Simplification of facility management based on a CSM approach recognizes that businesses need a flexible, easy to understand, multi-media solution in today’s multi-regulatory world. Locus’ CSM-based environmental portal provides the tools to quantify environmental liabilities, manage sustainability and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, report water footprint, organize compliance and Health and Safety (H&S) records, accurately report to regulators, and run what-if analysis to facilitate forecasting.

“The increased sophistication of the corporate customer, combined with the recent challenging economic climate has fueled the need for easy to use integrated solutions that allow fewer people to manage more using less. That was the driving force behind ePortal’s recent update, which provides a single software solution, across the various regulated media. Historically, many companies have built silo applications that deal with one or a few reporting requirements and associated data management needs. In fact, some companies have been building software solutions in this space for over a decade. But what has been lacking in the market space is an integrated solution that brings many if not all environmental, energy, water and other compliance and consumption requirements under a single portal infrastructure and Single Sign On (SSO) on the web. What industry wants and needs is an integrated system similar to ERP that would manage all their environmental, energy, water, and other sustainability needs. That is exactly what we have built and are happy to offer it to our clients,” said Dr. Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus.

Locus Scored in Green Quadrant of Carbon and Energy Management Software Report

Locus’ Cloud-based Software High on Leading Analysts Lists

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 22 November 2010 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental compliance and information management software, has been recognized as one of the top 28 firms for greenhouse gas (GHG) and Energy Management software in the report, “Green Quadrant® Carbon and Energy Management Software, 2010.” This report by Verdantix, an independent analyst firm focused on sustainable business strategies and market opportunities, comes only weeks after Gartner, Inc., the leading provider of research and analysis on the global information technology industry, in another study entitled “Sustainable Business Systems: Differentiating Sustainable Solutions by Functional Domain,” recognized Locus as a high growth, high foresight company whose software brings to its customers high enterprise efficiency and optimization intelligence. Gartner also recognized Locus’ focused analysis of key environmental parameters, including water foot-printing, and its incorporation of spatial data analysis in all of its SaaS solutions.

“Based on the insights from our customer panel and our in-depth interviews we define carbon and energy management software as: Software designed to help individuals responsible for carbon and energy management to collect, store, audit, report, analyze, and forecast carbon emissions and energy consumption data to meet business objectives such as planning, reduction, budgeting, compliance and trading,” said David Metcalfe, Verdantix Director. “The global market for carbon and energy software is intensely competitive — buyers choose from over 100 suppliers. To help buyers save time, save money and reduce risk in their selection process this Verdantix Green Quadrant report compares the 28 software applications that pre-qualify as a potential fit for $1 billion revenue firms. Our analysis is based on interviews with 15 buyers collectively representing firms with revenues of $260 billion, live demonstrations of the 28 applications and supplier responses to a 99 point questionnaire. Before jumping to conclusions about the best fit supplier, buyers need to conduct a detailed assessment of their business strategy, available budget and usage scenarios. Suppliers in the Challenger, Specialist and Entrepreneur Quadrants may meet requirements just as well as the Leaders,” added Mr. Metcalfe.

The Verdantix report recognized that Locus Technologies’ environmental compliance software has evolved into broader sustainable business software. The report states that Locus is one of only two firms in the Entrepreneurs Quadrant that claim more than 10 customers with more than $1 billion in revenue. The report further states that “the Entrepreneurs have more opportunity to win customers in the price-sensitive mid-market.” Overall, Locus scored strong in customer momentum, master data management and financial resources.

“We are very pleased that some of the leading industry analysts, first Gartner, and now Verdantix, have recognized Locus as a potential fit for $1 billion revenue firms in the sustainability, carbon and energy software space,” said Dr. Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus. “With our suite of diverse but well integrated products to organize water, energy, waste and carbon emissions information across different regulatory frameworks, Locus is well positioned to continue to lead the environmental software market. Locus has served this market exceptionally well since 1997, and maintains the leading position in many of its segments,” noted Dr. Duplan.

The environmental software market has become a multi-billion dollar industry with new players entering almost weekly. The current environmental software leaders in the Verdantix report include a mix of startups funded by venture capital and longtime software players from other arenas. According to Dr. Duplan, “Locus stands apart from this competition in terms of its long history and domain expertise. Since its founding 13 years ago, Locus has compiled a proven track record of delivering complex environmental information management and compliance solutions over the Internet to some of the world largest companies.” The company integrates a deep and versatile set of applications that not only manage GHGs but also provide management of other, mission-critical environmental data and information, such as water quality and resource consumption management.

The California Air Resources Board (ARB) Extends the Deadline for Mandatory Greenhouse Gas Reporting

Two-month grace period for operators subject to 1 October 2010 verification deadline

The California Air Resources Board (ARB) announced the deadline extension for operators subject to 1 October 2010 verification deadline

The reason for extension is that ARB understands that most reporters and verifiers are still learning the verification requirements in the Mandatory Reporting Regulation (Regulation) and understanding the verification process. In order to ensure adequate time for reporters and verifiers subject to the Regulation’s 1 October 2010 verification deadline, ARB is administratively providing a one-time grace period of two months for submission of the verification opinions due by that date. As such, verification opinions subject to the 1 October 2010 deadline must be submitted by 1 December 2010.

For more information, please visit: www.arb.ca.gov

Chevron Extends Partnership with Locus for Web-based Environmental Information Management

Contract, first awarded in 2003, renewed for another term

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., September 27, 2010 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental compliance and information management software, has announced that Chevron U.S.A. Inc (Chevron) has renewed a contract with Locus for use of Locus’ Environmental Information Management (EIM) software.

In 2003 Chevron selected Locus’ web-based EIM software to organize and manage environmental laboratory data for environmental remediation projects. Chevron used EIM to consolidate analytical data and as a tool for uniform environmental database management practices by analytical laboratories and environmental consultants. The web-based EIM software can organize and manage large amounts of environmental information and allows for automated data acquisition and reporting.

“We are very pleased that Chevron extended its Locus contract for EIM. EIM provides companies with tools to effectively manage their environmental information and efficiently perform key business analytics and reporting across their organizations,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus.

Locus presents at GRA Meeting: Thinking Outside the Pipe Exploring & Protecting Local Water Supplies

This two-day conference provided the latest scientific, management, legal and policy information regarding sustainable use of our local water resources in urban regions.