Project:
Former and Active Gasoline Service Stations
Bottom Line: Developed a streamlined and consistent process to establish environmental liability and costs for a portfolio of 100+ active and former service stations.
Summary of Project
Orion was the lead consultant in a three-team collaboration to assist a client in the acquisition of 100+ active and former service station properties in Arizona, California, and Nevada. Over a 2-year period, the client considered three opportunities to purchase or lease portfolios of 100 to 300 stations.
Orion developed a standardized process to evaluate the environmental liability of the portfolio. The process produced environmental cost estimates and was implemented with quality control checks to ensure defensible and realistic estimates that were audited by a third-party accounting firm. For each property, Orion generated an environmental liability report that included a summary and evaluation of environmental conditions, recommended scope and duration of future activities, and environmental cost estimates. To prepare the environmental liability reports, the following was performed for each property:
- Reviewed the most recent monitoring and remediation status reports and pertinent historical reports, including investigation reports, closure requests, corrective action plans, site conceptual models, work plans, remedial action plans, and regulatory correspondence available from project files through various state and private databases
- Identified and evaluated soil, groundwater, and vapor impacts, presence of free product, plume delineation, concentration trends, existing remediation infrastructure, effectiveness of remedial efforts to date, sensitive receptors, and case closure criteria
- Developed a remedial strategy for each site that included recommendations for future investigation to complete plume delineation, proposed remedial technology if warranted (new system installations or system modifications), monitoring and sampling program, and closure activities (well abandonment, system decommissioning, and site restoration)
- Prepared three life-cycle cost estimates for each site remedial strategy assuming “best,” “worst,” and “likely” case scenarios.