San Jose Water Company selects Locus Technologies for its water quality and environmental management system software

The Locus EIM SaaS will streamline SJWC’s entire water compliance continuum from watershed to water treatment to water quality at its consumer’s tap

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 24 February 2015 — Locus Technologies, a leader in environmental and compliance enterprise management software, today announced that San Jose Water Company (SJWC), an investor-owned utility providing water service to a population of approximately one million people in the Santa Clara Valley, has selected Locus as its environmental information management system. SJWC is deploying the Locus EIM SaaS-based software to consolidate and manage its field data collection; water compliance and water quality data; and all its environmental compliance and environmental data. SJWC will also use the Locus EIM to manage its environmental permits for all its sites and facilities.

“Water quality and environmental compliance are critical business functions at San Jose Water Company,” said Francois Rodigari, Director of Water Quality and Environmental Services. “Locus and its EIM software are giving us, for the first time, the ability to consolidate and access critical information on data related to water quality and environmental compliance in a single repository based on a cloud platform. This comprehensive view of our water system will help us to comprehensively manage all data related to drinking water and environmental compliance, and as a result, bring higher efficiency to our organization.”

Locus EIM is a comprehensive and configurable software designed to manage mission-critical environmental and sustainability data to help organization organize, manage, report, and visualize sampling, analytical, and subsurface data for compliance and assurance reporting for a variety of vertical markets including water, gas and oil, power generating utilities, and food and beverage.

“Our mission is to help organization, such as San Jose Water Company, to achieve their environmental stewardship goals by providing them the software tools to control the management of all data points of their water quality and compliance management,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus. “Our EIM water quality management cloud-based software for surface water, drinking water, groundwater, and wastewater provides our customers with a highly scalable and a feature rich application that gives water utilities strong analytical power, streamlined field sampling capabilities, mobile collection, and analysis as well as compliance management. We are pleased San Jose Water Company will be utilizing EIM to ensure that their customers are provided with the highest water quality possible.”

 

ABOUT SAN JOSE WATER
San Jose Water Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of SJW Corp. and founded in 1866, is an investor-owned water company headquartered in Silicon Valley and is one of the largest and most technically sophisticated urban water system in the United States. SJWC serves over 1 million people in the San Jose metropolitan area comprising about 138 square miles. The utility ensures its buyers with high quality, life sustaining water, with an emphasis on exceptional customer service.

Locus Technologies’ Customer Exelon Corp. to Present at the NAEM EHS and Sustainability Software Conference Feb 24-25

Exelon’s Eric Schwarz to Discuss “Succeeding in Managing Water Quality and Monitoring at Nuclear Facilities”

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 17 February 2015 — Locus Technologies, a leader in environmental compliance and sustainability management software, today announced that Exelon Corporation’s Radiochemist/Radiological Environmental Monitoring Program Administrator, Eric Schwarz, will present at The National Association for Environmental Management (NAEM) conference as part of the EH&S and Sustainability Software conference on Wednesday, February 25 from 3 p.m. – 4:45 p.m. The presentation and demonstration will focus on his experience and insight on water quality management at Exelon’s nuclear facilities. Exelon is one of the largest U.S. power generators that delivers electricity and natural gas to more than 7.8 million customers and distinguished as one of the nation’s cleanest and lowest-cost power generating organizations. At the conference, Locus will host its corporate booth, booth 12, located in Ballroom I, at the Westin Tampa Harbour Island Conference Center.

Title: Succeeding in Managing Water Quality and Monitoring at Nuclear Facilities
When: Two sessions – Wednesday, February 25 from 3 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.
Where: Westin Tampa Harbour Island Conference Center, Ballrooms I & II
Exelon to Discuss and Demonstrate: Radiological groundwater protection program operations and monitoring data management is critical for 11 nuclear facilities in the U.S. and Canada. The demo will show how Locus EIM, ePortal, and Locus Mobile provides enterprise tools for proactive trending, analysis, visualization, and reporting from massive data aggregation from varied sources.
Who: Eric Schwarz, Exelon’s Radiochemist/ Radiological Environmental Monitoring Program Administrator. Schwarz oversees the radiological environment monitoring and radioactive effluent controls for Exelon’s Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania. Schwarz’s nuclear radiochemistry career began in the U.S. Navy where, for more than 14 years, he gained technical expertise in several disciplines and specialties to ensure regulatory compliance and safety.

NAEM empowers corporate leaders to advance environmental stewardship, create safe and healthy workplaces, and promote global sustainability. Locus Technologies is a Gigabyte sponsor at this event.

Locus Technologies’ Relationship with Chevron Environmental Management Company (CEMC) Renewed

Locus EIM SaaS Named as Preferred Solution for Environmental Data Management

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 10 February 2015 — Locus Technologies, a leader in environmental and EH&S compliance enterprise and sustainability software, today announced that Chevron Environmental Management Company (CEMC), a subsidiary of Chevron Corporation, one of the world’s largest integrated energy companies, has extended its relationship with the company to include contract renewal as well as distinguishing Locus’ award-winning Environmental Information Management (EIM) solution as the system of record for managing environmental-based analytical lab and field data.

Chevron selected Locus EIM system as its preferred solution after a year-long competitive bidding process that included rigorous proof of concept testing, vendor capability analysis, and usability testing. Locus EIM will provide a scalable SaaS system for sustainable management of environmental analytical lab and field data. Locus EIM will support Chevron’s EMC’s standardized processes to improve environmental data quality, accessibility, and reporting.

“Locus has supported Chevron with our flagship EIM software since 2003,” said Neno Duplan, CEO and president of Locus Technologies. “Corporations today want to invest into one environmental and sustainability solution that offers scalability, system flexibility, and user friendliness, while at the same time, achieve operational cost reductions and improve their environmental stewardship. Many Fortune 500 companies who need a comprehensive solution designed for sustainability, compliance and reporting rely upon our Locus EIM SaaS solution. We are pleased that Chevron selected EIM as a system of record for their environmental data and information management.”

 

ABOUT LOCUS EIM
The Locus EIM SaaS offers enterprise environmental information management for analytical data for water quality, chemicals, radionuclides, geology and hydrogeology. EIM provides the whole solution and supports workflow from sample planning, collection, analysis, data validation, visualization and reporting. Locus Mobile is fully integrated with EIM and provides for real time field data collection and synchronization with EIM.

 Natural Gas Usage Up with Leaky Consequences

Environment challenge: Use a cleaner resource without environmental impact.  The reality, even good environmental intentions produce by-products and/or have risk than need to be monitored. Check out this insightful article about natural gas.

Fact: Natural gas now produces 27 percent of the electricity generated in the United States, and the percentage is rising. Natural gas is cleaner than coal and at a lower price point.  But as with all energy producing resources, there is an enemy and in this case, the arch enemy is methane. What is worse, it is leaky. The New Times Editor, John Schwartz, digs in deep of the issues, long term implications, political policies, and environmental impact of natural gas.

Using the New 4K Display Technology Could Be a Disruptive Catalyst for New Environmental-based Solutions

The recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) unleashed a plethora of new products to improve the daily lives of consumers. One product that caught my environmental eye was the Hewlett-Packard HP Zvr. ZDNet describes the new hologram-based screen as a step toward “true holographic viewing”.
The reporter, Larry Dignan, goes on to say “a test drive of the display was notable, because it allowed you to manipulate content, dissect frogs, inspect the inner workings of the heart and play with architecture options.” I have personally not seen the display, but the idea of inspecting the inner workings of the heart got me dreaming of environmental-based solutions. Could 3D (in this case, 4K screen technology) be used to view underground contamination of water aquifers?   Imagine using 4K imagery, coupled with analytical data of water chemistry in our EIM system, add smartphone-delivered real-time field data plus smart apps and you have a complete and unique turnkey environmental package. Compliant heavy industries initially would benefit most, as they could finally collect previous unattainable data as well as display an accurate picture of contaminants and their impact on environment. Is a fully-integrated visual environmental 4K real time application in the future? One observation is certain, the rate of technology innovation, and more importantly, the rate of adoption, over the past 10 years surpasses even the wildest imagination.

Decommissioning of Nuclear Power Plants to Exceed $100 Billion, Less Than Decommissioning of Oil Offshore Platforms

The cost of decommissioning nuclear reactors that will be closed around the world between now and 2040 will top $100 billion, according to the latest annual report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). For comparison, decommissioning just North Sea oil and gas facilities is projected to cost about $70 billion over the next 25 years.
The report notes that, of a total of about 200 nuclear reactors now operating globally, about 38% of those will be shut down over the next 25 years,. About 44% of these reactors are in the European Union (EU) nations, another 16% are located in the United States, and 12% are in Japan. IEA warned that governments and their energy agencies have little experience in the craft of decommissioning—only 10 reactors have been decommissioned over the last 40 years so the report’s estimates of the ultimate costs must be regarded as a minimum level of expenditure. The estimate does not take into account the need to construct facilities to store the waste that’s accumulating at these facilities, according to Fatih Birol, IAE’s chief economist, who added that, 60 years after the first nuclear power plant started up operations, no country has yet built a permanent disposal facility for high-level nuclear waste.

Hydrofracking Wastewater Treatment Market to Triple

Hydrofracking wastewater treatment market to triple

The U.S. market for treating produced water and flowback water generated during the process of hydrologic fracturing, or “fracking,” in oil and gas production will increase substantially from $138 million in 2014 to $357 million in 2020, according to a recent report by Bluefield Research (Boston, MA).

The report finds that, overall, the U.S. oil and gas industry will spend $6.38 billion in 2014 on water management, including water supply, transport, storage, treatment, and disposal. The transport and disposal components will account for 66% of the total costs, while treatment will only constitute 2% of that expenditure this year, but treatment will gain as the industry requires more reuse of its wastewater. The “fracking” industry has been a kind of “wild west” for the U.S. water industry, according to Bluefield analyst Reese Tisdale, because of the explosive build-out of fracking wells, the lack of clear regulation of water management in key markets, and the absence to date of a consistent method for treating the wastewater.

California’s Water Shortage

A new paper published in Nature Climate Change, by NASA water scientist James Famiglietti, presents the chilling reality of California’s ongoing drought crisis. “The Global Groundwater Crisis,” uses satellite data to measure the depletion of the world’s aquifers, and summarizes the effects this has on the environment.

These aquifers contain groundwater that more than 2 billion individuals rely on as their primary source of water. Groundwater is also essential, as it is one of the main sources we rely on to irrigate food crops. In times of drought, the lack of rain and snow results in less surface water (the water that settles in lakes, streams, and rivers). Thus, farmers must rely on available groundwater to irrigate their crops, leading to rapid depletion in areas of high farming concentration.

California’s Central Valley has been one of the most effected regions in the state. The map below depicts groundwater withdrawals in California during the first three years of the state’s ongoing drought.

According to James Famiglietti, “California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins have lost roughly 15 cubic kilometers of total water per year since 2011.”  That means “more water than all 38 million Californians use for domestic and municipal supplies annually—over half of which is due to groundwater pumping in the Central Valley.”

As more water is pumped from the aquifers, things can only get worse. As this trend continues, wells will have to be dug deeper, resulting in increased pumping costs. This, in turn, will lead to a higher salt contents, which inhibits crop yields and can eventually cause soil to lose productivity altogether. Over time, Famiglietti writes, “inequity issues arise because only the relatively wealthy can bear the expense of digging deeper wells, paying greater energy costs to pump groundwater from increased depths and treating the lower-quality water that is often found deeper within aquifers.” This problem is already apparent in California’s Central Valley.  Some low-income residents are forced to let their wells go dry, while many other farmers are forced to irrigate with salty water pumped from deep in the aquifer.

The lesson we can learn from Famiglietti’s research is that “Groundwater is being pumped at far greater rates than it can be naturally replenished, so that many of the largest aquifers on most continents are being mined, their precious contents never to be returned.”  This problem of diminishing groundwater is perpetuated, due the lack of forethought, regulation, or research concerning this water source. Famiglietti contends that if current trends hold, “groundwater supplies in some major aquifers will be depleted in a matter of decades.”

Without any change of practices, we can expect steeper droughts and more demand for water. Famiglietti suggests that if we ever plan on getting the situation under control, we must start carefully measuring groundwater and treat it like the precious resource that it is. However, if the globe continues on this path without any adjustment, it will most likely result in civil uprising and international violent conflict in the water-stressed regions of the world.

NASA now says massive methane cloud over U.S. Southwest is legitimate

Several years ago, NASA scientists discovered a cloud of methane gas over the Four Corners of the American southwest that measured about the size of Delaware. The unusually high readings were dismissed then; however, a new study today confirms that the methane hot spot is legitimate.

“We didn’t focus on it because we weren’t sure if it was a true signal or an instrument error,” said NASA research scientist Christian Frankenberg, who works in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, California.

The Christian Science Monitor website states that a 2,500 square mile methane cloud over the region where Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona connect traps more heat in a 1-year period than all of Sweden’s annual carbon dioxide emissions.

To provide an overview of gases that endanger the Earth’s atmosphere, methane gas is the most powerful of the greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide is another greenhouse gas, and is more abundant in our atmosphere. However, methane is more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

A new study published 10 October 2014 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters takes a look at the data discovered several years ago and confirms what we now know to be North America’s largest methane hot spot. According to lead author of the study, Eric Kort, a professor of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the source of the methane is from extensive coal mining activity in the San Juan Basin. According to Kort, the Basin is “the most active coalbed methane production area in the country.”

There has been a notable increase in fracking in that region. Both Kort and Frankenberg believe that the earlier coal mining is most likely to blame for the methane cloud.  From 2003 to 2009, the study shows there were 0.59 million metric tons of methane released each year — 3.5 times more than previous estimates.

According to Kort, “The results are indicative that emissions from established fossil fuel harvesting techniques are greater than inventoried. There’s been so much attention on high-volume hydraulic fracturing, but we need to consider the industry as a whole.”

Locus’ Intellus Promotes Big Data Transparency: More Than 14 Million Environmental Sampling Records from National Laboratory Are Now Available Online

Previously contained in a dozen independent databases, the integrated records of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) — are now stored in one location, the publicly-accessible website Intellus.

Through the Locus EIM platform public facing website, Intellus, the general public can now access remediation and environmental data records associated with the Office of Environmental Management’s (EM’s) legacy nuclear cleanup program.

Containing more than 14 million records, Locus’ Intellus has consolidated Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL’s) information that was previously handled in multiple independent databases. The centralized, cloud-based solution directly attributed to an estimated $15 million in cost savings for LANL through 2015.

The public facing site also ensures users have real-time access to the most recent data. The same data that scientists and analysts use to base important environmental stewardship decisions off of. Through tools and capabilities such as automated electronic data validation, interactive maps, and the ability to include data from other third-party providers and environmental programs, Intellus provides the ultimate platform to view LANL’s environmental data without compromising the core EIM system that LANL scientists use on a daily basis.

Locus has always advocated for the power of data transparency via the cloud. When you apply the most extensive security protocols to a cloud-based system, it can be a winning combination for data management and public trust.