Is the U.S. Emitting More Methane Than We Thought?

According to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the United States may be emitting 50 percent more methane than the federal government had originally estimated. Methane, a greenhouse gas, is less prevalent in our atmosphere than carbon but is also a more powerful heat-trapping gas- approximately 21 times more potent over a 100 year period.

The new study argues that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) underestimated methane emissions because it calculated from the bottom-up, whereas the new study took a different approach. The PNAS study, conducted by Scot M. Miller, a doctoral student in Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University, along with researchers from seven other institutions, took measurements of methane actually released into the atmosphere. More specifically, it analyzed almost 5,000 air samples collected from tall towers around the U.S. in 2007 and 2008, and more than 7,700 samples taken over this same period by research aircrafts.

Based on their research, the following are a few conclusions that were reached:

  • Methane from Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas was 2.7 times higher than previously recorded (these three states alone account for nearly one-quarter of U.S. methane emissions)
  • Methane emissions from livestock are nearly two times as high as earlier measurements
  • Current atmospheric concentrations of methane are nearly triple the levels found in the preindustrial era; human activity being responsible for 50 to 65 percent of global methane emissions

These findings will no doubt impact the debate about how both regulators and industry should handle reducing methane emissions.

As if this isn’t enough of a reason for concern, new research published in Nature Geoscience finds that significant amounts of methane are currently escaping the East Siberian Shelf. This methane is stored on the floor of the Arctic Ocean, being held down by permafrost. However, it has been escaping recently due to both powerful storms stirring up the ocean that bring the methane to the surface faster, and global warming thawing the permafrost; creating a perpetual cycle.

This new research and press may be able to put the spotlight on a greenhouse gas other than carbon, and also on how important it is to reduce these methane emissions.

Locus Announces Railroad Industry Specific Incident Management Module

Companies can comply with FRA and other health and safety regulations through the use of Locus’ Incident software

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 12 November 2013—October 28, 2013 —Locus Technologies (Locus), the leader in cloud-based environmental compliance and information management software, has added a railroad-specific health and safety (H&S) incident management module to its software offerings.

The Incident module enables users to report and manage railroad accidents and incidents in compliance with Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) regulations. Other features of the Incident module include easy-to-use data entry forms for incidents and near misses; the ability to associate multiple injuries/illnesses to an incident; customizable dashboards to view incident trends and other key metrics; automated incident notifications with configurable workflows; and push-button generation of report-ready FRA and OSHA 300, 300A, and 301 forms.

“When it comes to incident management, company managers should be able to have an easily accessible, all-encompassing view of what’s occurring across all of their different facilities, sites, and incident locations,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus. “Locus’ H&S Incident module represents a single repository in the cloud, that offers railroad-specific functionality and ease of use for managing incident investigations, and analyzing key safety metrics aimed at reducing accidents and mitigating risks.”

This module represents Locus’ continuous commitment to the enhancement and expansion of its software offerings. The railroad-specific Incident module is available for use immediately.

Los Alamos National Laboratory Extends Contract with Locus Technologies for Four More Years

Locus to continue managing environmental data and information for the nation’s largest laboratory

SAN FRANCISCO, California and LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, October 28, 2013 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in Web-based environmental software, announced today that Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has chosen to extend its contract with Locus for four more years.

LANL is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security (LANS), located in Los Alamos, N.M. LANL conducts multidisciplinary research in national security, outer space, renewable energy, medicine, nanotechnology, and supercomputing. LANL is one of three laboratories in the United States at which the government conducts classified work to care for the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.

Modifications that accompany the extended contract include additional functionality for air data management and reporting that involves better flexibility for increased data transparency. LANL also will put more focus on field and mobile devices, and significant enhancements will be made to Intellus New Mexico, the public-facing website that Locus created for LANL’s data.

The original contract between LANL and Locus began in 2011, with the option of extending the contract for four additional years. LANL will continue to use Locus’ Environmental Information Management software (EIM) to address legacy site contamination and to take a better aggregate view of its operations for environmental stewardship.

“We are very proud that LANL trusts our EIM software to continue assisting it with its environmental data management requirements,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus. “We look forward to continuing to work with the team of talented professionals at LANL, and also continuing to assist DOE sites with their environmental data management challenges.”

“High-quality data is a crucial component in environmental stewardship and our commitment to transparency with the public,” said Chris Echohawk, office leader of the Laboratory’s Operations Improvement Office.

 

ABOUT LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, the Babcock & Wilcox Company, and URS for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.

LANL news media contact: Fred deSousa, (505) 665-3430, fdesousa@lanl.gov

Locus Introduces New Platform for Environmental Enterprise Resource Planning

The new Locus platform offers a highly configurable, user-friendly interface to fully meet individual organizations’ environmental management needs

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 21 October 2013 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the leader in cloud-based environmental and sustainability management software, introduces its newest platform to redefine how companies organize, manage, visualize, and report their environmental, sustainability, and compliance information.

Today, environmental, sustainability, and energy managers for organizations of all sizes face myriad options from software suppliers offering various single-domain applications. Challenged with an ever-evolving regulatory landscape, these managers must select a software provider that can adapt to new compliance constraints and the constant changes of existing regulations, often with multijurisdictional requirements; unfortunately, most software suppliers have rigid platforms or applications that fail to keep up with constantly changing needs, are hard to integrate, and are often obsolete before they are even implemented.

To address this industry challenge, the company designed the new Locus platform to provide rich functionality in a simple way so that it would be easy for customers to make the most of their data management and reporting requirements. In addition, the new platform helps companies avoid many of the costs generally associated with implementing traditional software systems thanks to its simple setup, navigation, and configuration options, thereby eliminating the need for expensive implementations, user training, and customizations.

Locus addressed common barriers to using environmental management software when designing the new Locus platform. Specifically, Locus conducted a gap analysis of current software offerings. It identified challenges through feedback from its end users and other industry professionals, and through customer surveys conducted by several industry research analysts’ firms over the last two years. Specifically, users were wary of complex and expensive systems and implementations; a rigid regulatory environment for businesses that made adapting to new systems costly and complicated; and integration of a new platform with legacy systems.

The resulting Locus platform offers an intuitive interface with the immense flexibility to incorporate features such as drag-and-drop forms creation, visual business-process modeling, Excel import/export integration, and a rich and configurable user dashboards and reporting interface. Locus created every feature with the end user in mind to promote quick and easy data capture and task management. Finally, customers should see significant savings over traditional software offerings both at the time of implementation and over the long term. Because the Locus platform’s system, upgrades, and maintenance are cloud-based rather than configured on individual user workstations, while users can configure the way they use the software, they do not need to pay for customization at the individual level.

“We listened to industry users and created configurable dashboards that are clean, dynamically driven, easy to read, and easy to access. This platform will improve companies’ data collection, analysis, and most importantly, reporting capabilities,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus. “The new Locus platform will make the required compliance and EH&S reporting expected of most companies more streamlined. The end result is the mitigation of regulatory risks and fines.”

The launch of the latest Locus platform follows the same guidelines and goals that the company established during the original inception of ePortal in 2000. This version is the latest embodiment of Locus’ industry differentiation: to offer an integrated solution so that companies can manage all of their environmental, energy, water, waste, carbon, air, health and safety, and compliance information in one place.

“We’ve updated the platform based on industry wants and needs,” remarked Duplan. “This isn’t a product of different solutions pieced together to look like one; it is the ‘whole solution.’ We have always created our products in this same vein because it means less time to configure, less time to implement, and far fewer support requirements. And it means a dramatically lower cost than customers have seen in the past with the ERP providers or point solutions from different vendors. Budget has long been a barrier to implementation and we are stepping up to the plate to solve that problem.”

Locus will conduct the first live demonstrations of the new platform at the Locus booth at the National Association for Environmental Management 2013 EHS Management Forum from October 23-25 in Montreal.

California’s Cap-and-Trade Program Gains Confidence

At last month’s carbon allowance auction, the fourth ever held, the California cap-and-trade program reached an important milestone. The auction of “current year allowances”, or permits that companies can use for this year’s carbon pollution, have sold out at every auction thus far- but this was the first time the auction completely sold out of its permits for future carbon pollution, for the year 2016 to be exact.

California sold almost 10 million future year permits at a clearing price of $11.10 per allowance, and almost 14 million current year permits at a clearing price of $12.22 per allowance. Never before has there been this great of a demand for future permits. Most believe this surge in interest reflects a growing confidence in California’s cap-and-trade program, and increasing recognition by state businesses that this program is here to stay.

The cap-and-trade program, that took effect in 2012, was enacted to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced in California that cause climate change. The programs intention is to aid California in meeting its goal of reducing GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and overall accomplishing an 80 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2050.

The recent carbon auction is a small achievement toward reaching this long-term goal. Locus fully supports these efforts; we were one of the first accredited verification bodies for greenhouse gas emissions, and our staff have also been certified as carbon offset verifiers under the California Air Resources Board. From our years of experience reporting greenhouse gases, Locus knows that participants in the cap-and-trade program have many options available to them in how they calculate and report their GHG data, and it is our personal goal to help them choose the best methods, through our technical experts or by using Locus’ cloud-based GHG software.

The Value of True SaaS for EHS Compliance

What if there was a better way to manage your EHS, compliance, and sustainability information?

Read full article here.

Rogue Disposal & Recycling, Inc. Selects Locus Technologies’ ePortal Software for Compliance Management

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 12 August 2013 — Rogue Disposal & Recycling, Inc. (Rogue), a company that’s been providing Southern Oregon with innovative solid waste disposal and recycling services for over 73 years, has selected Locus Technologies’ cloud-based ePortal software for its compliance management.Rogue will use ePortal to take a more holistic view of its operations, and to proactively manage all compliance activities associated with its Dry Creek Landfill site. The company’s decision to use ePortal for compliance management stems from its continuous commitment to environmental responsibility. Rogue has always strived to become an environmentally conscious leader, and has enacted various innovative “green” policies and programs in order to do its part to both improve and protect the environment.

“Rogue’s overall goal is to be the leading environmental company in Southern Oregon,” said Lee Fortier, Dry Creek Landfill’s General Manager. “Locus’ ePortal system will help us to actively monitor all of our environmental compliance activities as we embrace the environmental regulations as our minimum commitment to our clients.”

“We are very pleased Rogue has chosen Locus to assist it with managing its compliance,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus. “We believe Rogue will reap the benefits of tracking and reporting on all compliance activities in a single cloud-based secure system.”

About Rogue Disposal & Recycling, Inc.
Rogue management’s goal is to be the greenest company in Southern Oregon. The company has worked hard to become an environmentally conscious leader by continually looking at ways to both improve and protect the environment. The company features: solar panels at its main transfer station facility to produce clean, renewable energy; two waste collection trucks powered entirely by compressed natural gas (CNG); and the innovative Dry Creek Landfill gas-to-energy facility that converts methane gas from landfill refuse to electrical energy. Rogue is dedicated to new technology and the best management practices that exceed governmental mandates in a continued effort to provide superior service, affordable rates and a commitment to recycling and environmental protection.

Locus Achieves a Microsoft Gold Application Development Competency

Locus demonstrates best-in-class capability and market leadership through demonstrated technology success and customer commitment

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 30 July 2013 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the leader in cloud-based environmental compliance and information management software, today announced it has attained a Gold Application Development competency, demonstrating a “best-in-class” ability and commitment to meet Microsoft Corp. customers’ evolving needs in today’s dynamic business environment and distinguishing itself within the top one percent of Microsoft’s partner ecosystem.

To earn a Microsoft gold competency, partners must successfully complete exams (resulting in Microsoft Certified Professionals) to prove their level of technology expertise, and then designate these certified professionals uniquely to one Microsoft competency, ensuring a certain level of staffing capacity. They also must submit customer references that demonstrate successful projects (along with implementing a yearly customer satisfaction study), meet a revenue commitment, and pass technology and/or sales assessments.

“This Microsoft Gold Application Development competency showcases our expertise in and commitment to today’s technology market and to providing our customers with the most advanced technology and functionality available,” said Neno Duplan, President & CEO of Locus. “We plan to accelerate our customers’ environmental data management success by combining this and other advanced web technologies with our deep domain expertise.”

“By achieving a gold competency, partners have demonstrated the highest, most consistent capability and commitment to the latest Microsoft technology,” said Jon Roskill, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft Corp. “These partners have a deep expertise that puts them in the top one percent of our partner ecosystem, and their proficiency will help customers drive innovative solutions on the latest Microsoft technology.”

Earning the Application Development competency helps partners differentiate themselves as a trusted expert to their customers through development and deployment of commercial or custom applications built using core Microsoft technologies.

Locus Ranked Second Largest Environmental Firm in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley Business Journal ranked the biggest environmental firms by the number of professionals in Silicon Valley. Locus Technologies is second out of twenty-five.