What You Do, and How We Support It

You help power companies and optimize how they manage 100,000,000s of tons of coal ash.

We help you optimize your approach to this market.

Coal Ash Remdiation

Market Challenges and Opportunities

The Dynamic U.S. Coal Ash Industry

Your business serves the U.S. coal ash industry, supporting owner/operators with urgent and substantial requirements.

The urgency comes from coal ash landfill and surface impoundment closures dictated by regulations.

The size of the challenge is substantial on all levels:

  • volumes of coal combustion products (CCPs) in the range of 2 Billion cubic yards
  • final cover sizes of landfills and impoundments approaching 40,000 acres
  • 100+ owner/operators, 300+ sites, and 700+ units
  • costs in the neighborhood of $1 Billion for a single location

While NGOs and community groups have taken issue with the coal industry in general, and in particular with respect to carbon emissions and coal ash handling, it is vital to remember that this is a triple bottom line issue. The issues being addressed today were accumulated over decades of power plant operations, and today industry is dealing with the “new normal”. Despite the uncertainty and upheaval that change inevitably causes, there’s a silver lining for those who seek it.

As an innovative service provider you can make a difference. But, this market is rapidly evolving, and it is very difficult for you to know what actions to take and when.

We empower you with business intelligence to see what lies ahead and make smarter decisions that benefit both you and your customers.

The Business Intelligence You Need

The US Coalash Market: What Information Matters

In the dynamic U.S. Coal Ash Market, you need insight to enable the right sales conversations and marketing investments. We provide dashboards containing current data, configured to your business, so you have fast accurate answers.

Whether you are a construction and engineering firm, an ash marketer, or a provider of valuable risk management products and services out business intelligence enables you to be more-successful. Data and visualizations are ready-to-use. This includes:

Timing. Although the market is substantial, it is finite. Most of the big moves are being made in the next 1 - 3 years, and timing matters. If you are too late, the plans may be written and approved, limiting your opportunity to participate.

Partnerships. Knowing that influencers matters, including the owner/operators, their engineering and consulting firms, and other solution providers.

Compliance Details. To effectively approach the market, details on coal combustion product volumes, impounded water, groundwater limit exceedances, and other information is extremely useful. Data is reported in standard units of measure to allow for easy reporting.

Source Documents. We provide direct access to hard-to-source documents, in a readable format.

Why Our Approach Works

We curate data, from 100s of sources, so that your team doesn't need to. Your business developers can spend the time on customer relationships rather than data curation and analysis.

You access, live, navigable data to answer important questions quickly, and with confidence.

Problems You Avoid

Our customers want to avoid the pain of being surprised.

Coal ash pond and landfill closures don't happen overnight. There are months or years of capital planning involved. If you plan ahead, you can anticipate and engage future opportunities, long ahead of receiving that dreaded cold RFP.

Our customers don't hate RFPs, they hate cold RFPs. The ones that they could have influenced, where the owner/operator did not take the best strategic approach to the market.

The only way to avoid the pain of a surprise RFP, or even worse, being left out of consideration is to have good business intelligence on the market.

Market Dynamics

Our Dynamic Regulatory Environment

The impact of the CCR Rule on the industry has been two-fold: first, landfill closures mean that managing coal ash has become a challenge while compliance requires environmental obligations to be considered. Owner/operators coming into conflict with the CCR rules face at least two primary challenges to keeping CCR units (existing landfills and surface impoundments) open: location restrictions and groundwater protection standard exceedance.

Concerning location restrictions, five criteria drive the compliance program with specific timeframes. CCR Units cannot be:

  • Located within five feet of the uppermost aquifer
  • Situated within a wetland
  • Located in fault areas
  • Situated within an active seismic zone, or
  • Located within unstable areas

Referring to these criteria by number, restrictions #2 through #5 would have lead to a CCR Unit closure by April 17, 2019. Restriction #1 has an action date of October 31, 2020, to cease operations and initiate shutdown.

Recent regulations continue to impact the industry. In a draft policy document issued as recently as November 4th, 2019, the EPA has proposed regulations against allowing unlined impoundments to continue receiving coal ash unless they leak, and also classifying “clay-lined” impoundments as lined, thereby allowing such units to operate indefinitely. The EPA is also proposing to set a revised date by which unlined surface impoundments must stop receiving waste and initiate closure.

These regulations are “self-implementing,” requiring facilities to comply with them without any action by a regulatory agency. Facilities are required to provide comprehensive and regular disclosure to states and communities to enable them to monitor and oversee these requirements.

Citizens, including the state and NGOs perform a crucial role in the implementation and enforcement of this rule. The EPA has designed recordkeeping and Internet posting requirements to help ensure transparency and to assist citizens in playing that role. Consequently, owners/operators publish the required information and updates on their websites.

There is a wealth of industry information hidden in the data published by these owners and operators. At FirmoGraphs™, we’ve undertaken the task of consolidating this data from owner/operator websites across the industry, mining hundreds of data attributes for insights. Every month, we publish this curated data in an easy-to-navigate database.

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LET'S START TODAY

Contact us for mutual discovery of BI needs and solutions. We help you run the race just a bit faster, and sometimes, that is all you need.

dave@firmographs.com
510-671-0373