What began in 1992 as a two-man local partnership has expanded to a 30-person business serving clients throughout the United States.

Envirotech Engineering and Consulting Inc. has grown considerably since the days Robert Stallings and Blaine Reely first went into business together. As it celebrates its 25th anniversary, Envirotech’s services, and its reach, have broadened considerably.

“One of our greatest strengths and our greatest weaknesses is the fact that for a 30-person engineering and environmental consulting firm, we do a whole lot,” said Jimmy Stallings, son of Robert and now the company’s president, chief executive officer and principal engineer.

 Born from an oil patch need

When the company began, the emphasis was primarily on civil engineering work, which remains part of the business today, Stallings said. That involves civil and commercial development, infrastructure design and stormwater systems design.

“The combination of working with the municipality and also working with private clients has served us well because we kind of understand the needs and the interests of both parties,” Stallings said.

Envirotech’s environmental focus comes from Robert Stallings’ background in the oil and gas industry.

“They saw the need because the environmental emphasis was coming to the oil patch,” Jimmy Stallings said. “The oil field you see today is not the oil field that it was back then.”

Envirotech, which is licensed in 17 states, produces due diligence reports on oil field properties before they are sold, assessing any environmental liability that may face the purchasing firm. The company consults on oil field cleanup work, acting as liaison between the oil and gas company, the regulatory authority and the landowner.

Oil and gas exploration requires a lot of water, Stallings said, and often occurs in areas where water is not readily available. Envirotech designs water recycling facilities to allow oil companies to treat the water they use for drilling one well for reuse on another.

Waste management

The landfill industry is another of Envirotech’s many clients.

“What we primarily focus on is construction quality assurance and quality control,” said Stallings. Envirotech functions as a third-party observer, “making sure the contractor builds what the engineer designed.” That can involve everything from city landfills to hazardous waste landfills or nuclear facilities.

Commercial hog farms are another focus of Envirotech, Stallings said. “Their waste management systems rely on very similar technologies (to landfills), to capture the manure and treat it.”

The firm also has drilling rigs that perform geotechnical and environmental drilling, most of which takes place within 100 feet of the surface, Stallings said. Geotechnical drilling measures soil strength and soil properties for construction, while environmental drilling is looking for sub-surface contamination of groundwater or soil.

Envirotech’s lab department does soil and concrete testing for construction projects, among other jobs. In addition, the company provides environmental services for golf courses.

Homegrown employees

For an engineering firm, Stallings said, Envirotech is not engineer-heavy. Many of its 30 employees, in fact, are non-engineers.

“These are what I would consider technical folks who have a high school or sometimes a college degree but not necessarily a professional degree like an engineering degree,” Stallings said. “But they’ve got on-the-job training and certifications through the different tests we run and equipment we use.

“We have chosen to approach it differently than most traditional firms. We try to balance our professional staff with our technical folks that can go out and provide services in the region, where we’ve got one engineer who’s got multiple people on each one of those projects.”

It is sometimes difficult to recruit professional people to Enid, said Stallings, but “we’ve found that there are a lot of great folks in Enid who have good technical skills, and you can give them some training, a little bit of knowledge, and they can go out and do a great job on these kinds of projects.”

Story provided by:  Enid News & Eagle

Written by:  Jeff Mullins, Senior Writer