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TerraTherm’s Tier-One technology treating chlorinated solvents at a site in southern California.

vaporized and are removed through vapor extraction wells. TerraTherm also utilizes steam enhanced extraction and electrical resistance heating at contaminated waste sites. TerraTherm is the only company of its kind that can advise, build and operate all three of the industry’s most main- stream in situ thermal remediation technologies. To date, TerraTherm has remediated 50 sites worldwide. Current work includes the removal of Agent Orange from 95,000 cubic yards at the airport in Danang, Vietnam. While TerraTherm’s method now represents the industry’s gold standard, the original technology developed by Shell was far from perfect. Over the years, TerraTherm has tin- kered with the approach, accruing an impressive list of ad- ditional patents in the process. “We carried on the tradition of authoring technical solu- tions to these problems in the ground,” Bierschenk says. “We were founded on an R&D mentality. We commercial- ized the inventions for Shell. Our company worked out all the bugs so that it could be mainstreamed.” To date, TerraTherm has remediated 50 sites worldwide.

workforce. That, says John M. Bierschenk, the firm’s co- founder and president, should be a difference maker as Ter- raTherm competes for contracts cleaning up its share of the estimated 300,000 hazardous sites still remaining in the U.S. alone. “It will generate more opportunities for our company that we didn’t even know about,” Bierschenk says. “Before Cas- cade, we had one sales person.” TerraTherm was founded in 2000 as a startup in need of cash, which came in the form of a $2.2-million joint in- vestment by MassVentures, a venture captial firm formed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and Bison Capital, a mid-market venture firm. Meanwhile, petroleum giant Shell Oil Co., through a subsidiary, had developed a technology, known as in situ thermal desorption, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s to enhance oil recovery from otherwise depleted fields. In 1999-2000, however, Shell exited the oil recovery indus- try and donated the technology to the University of Texas. From there, Bierschenk and his partner, Ralph Baker, ob- tained the exclusive license to commercialize the technol- ogy within the United States. Within two years of forming the company, they secured the license to commercialize the technology worldwide. “That’s how we got into the business,” Bierschenk says. In its simplest form, ISTD uses its patented electrical heat- er elements to heat the ground until the contaminants are

See TERRATHERM, page 8

uary 29, 2016, ISSUE 1141

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