John,
I have been doing a little digging myself;
The US Federal Government and state governments have mandated
the cleanup of contaminated soil. Further, the regulators recommend these pollutants be eliminated, not merely transferred from one venue to another. "According to the Environmental Protection Agency, hazardous waste sites in the United States on federal land alone has grown to 61,000 sites with a clean up cost estimated at $389,000,000,000.00. There are approximately 295,000 leaking underground storage tank sites, containing at least 56 million cubic yards of soil requiring cleanup at an estimated cost of $30,000,000,000.00. The size of the underground storage tank sites vary and the locations are numerous. This calls for a highly mobile, environmentally sound, cost effective soil washing system capable of cleaning hydrocarbon contaminated soils on site, while meeting or exceeding both state and federal regulatory requirements."
There are a number of players in this field. Yahoo shows about 150 under bio-remediation. But as one can see the market is a huge, yet specialized market and the rewards at becoming an industry leader in it are high. Given the high number of federal land sites that need attention, one wonders what the number is for non-government owned land. A very interesting observation that I have noted; Most of the companies in this field are recently developed, yet have management teams with many years of experience in the petroleum fields.
It seems we are now looking at cleaning-up the sizeable mess that our collective past carelessness and sloppiness has caused. President Clinton announced some major initiative calls for cleaning-up all
the industrial pollutants of the last century. That is probably why
we are seeing so many companies now focussing their attention to this area. Money (Federal) is not a problem.
The last sentence in the first full paragraph says a lot; "This calls for a highly mobile, environmentally sound, cost effective soil washing system capable of cleaning hydrocarbon contaminated soils on site, while meeting or exceeding both state and federal regulatory requirements." It appears that the (BUGS) remediation process meets the mobile, environmentally sound, and on site aspects. The
cost effective aspect remains to be seen.
Provided they (GVS) can produce enough (microbes) to satisfy the BioRaptor units they are to be selling...they can just about give away the BioRaptors and concentrate on expanding capacity for the microbes. Of course it only works that way in the shaving sector; ie., give away the shavers and sell the blades. But one can quickly get a picture for the size of the neutralizing agents (bugs) market. I read where one BioRaptor Machine if used continously...could use $500,000
of 'bugs' a year. Depending on the price of the BioRaptor..it would seem that a company would want that thing to operational as often as possible to pay back for the initial cost.
Please let me know anything you can come up with.
Frank |
