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Deals keep sewage boss flush - O’Brien companies have made millions from government
Chicago Sun-Times (IL) - Monday, November 2, 2009
Author: Tim Novak, The Chicago Sun-Times

For 21 years, Terrence J. O’Brien has been on the board of Cook County’s sewage-treatment operation, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago.

During that time, O’Brien and his friends have started more than a dozen companies, including two engineering firms that have landed at least $3 million in contracts over the past decade from governments including the state of Illinois, the City of Chicago and the town of Cicero.

The Chicago Democrat, now running for Cook County Board president, has regularly reported his ownership of those companies, as required. But he has never disclosed all of the government contracts those companies have gotten.

Asked to make public that information, his campaign staff provided the Chicago Sun-Times a list of government contracts for only two of O’Brien’s companies.

O’Brien says his companies “never have” done work for the Water Reclamation District, where he has been president since 1997, a part-time job that pays $80,000.

That contradicts a statement he signed and filed with the Cook County clerk in December 2005 in which he reported that the district had paid one of his companies — K-Plus Engineering Ltd. — “in excess of $1,200” the previous year.

“That was an error on Terry’s part,” O’Brien campaign manager DeShana Forney says.

She says O’Brien was mistaken when he reported that his company had done work for the Water Reclamation District.

Officials of the district — which treats sewage and wastewater for most of Cook County — “did an exhaustive search” but could find no records showing O’Brien’s companies did any work for the government agency he oversees, spokeswoman Jill Horist says. She says it was “possible but remote” that a district contractor might have hired an O’Brien company as a subcontractor.

O’Brien was among five shareholders in K-Plus Engineering when the company got a contract two years ago with Cook County, under the administration of Cook County Board President Todd Stroger, the man O’Brien wants to replace.

At a meeting on June 19, 2007, the county board agreed to pay K-Plus Engineering $369,916 for construction engineering for work on 127th Street in Lemont. Six days later, the company’s top shareholder, John Cichzewski, agreed to buy out his four partners, including O’Brien. O’Brien got $208,250, according to records from his campaign.

During O’Brien’s four years as a shareholder, K-Plus Engineering got contracts from the state of Illinois, the City of Chicago and DuPage County totaling $1.3 million, records show. According to his campaign staff, K-Plus also did work for other governmental agencies, but it wouldn’t provide details.

O’Brien is a shareholder in five other companies — all with K-Plus in their names — that do environmental engineering, pipefitting and industrial cleanup, his staff says.

His biggest stake is in K-Plus Environmental Services, which pays him $100,000 a year plus a cut of profits, Forney says. O’Brien, who has a bachelor’s degree in sociology, owns 50 percent of the company. The other half is owned by Daniel Caplice, a former engineer with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Caplice — pronounced K-Plus — is a younger brother of O’Brien’s college friend Thomas Caplice, who’s chairman of O’Brien’s campaign fund-raising committee.

O’Brien’s campaign provided records showing K-Plus Environmental has gotten another $1.3 million in contracts since 1998 from governments including the Public Building Commission of Chicago, the town of Cicero, the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority and the Glenview Public Library.

The list didn’t include $133,667 in work the company got from the City of Chicago.

K-Plus Environmental customers also include some companies whose wastewater discharges are regulated by the Water Reclamation District. On Friday, Crain’s Chicago Business reported that O’Brien personally has done work for four of those companies: Nalco Corp., Borg Warner Automotive, ITW/Signode and S & C Electric. O’Brien told Crain’s the work he did for those companies didn’t involve his agency.

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Nalco glad Buffett bought 5 percent of company
Naperville Sun, The (IL) - Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Author: David Sharos, For The Sun
Company officials at Naperville-based Nalco Holding Co., a water treatment and processing equipment and services company, are feeling pretty good about themselves after learning this week that one of the world’s most respected investors has purchased more than 5 percent of their company.

Nalco has announced that billionaire investor Warren Buffett and his company, Berkshire Hathaway, filed required reports with the Security and Exchange Commission of purchasing 8.7 million shares of the company by the end of last year.

Charlie Pajor, senior manager of external communications for Nalco , said the recent acquisition makes Berkshire among the top three shareholders in the company.

“We actually feel really good about the fact that one of the leading investors in the world has the confidence in Nalco and has decided to express this kind of confidence in us,” Pajor said. “We realize Mr. Buffett is someone who knows what the ‘numbers’ are, and we’re happy he has decided to invest in us.”

Pajor said the company’s top shareholder owns about 13 percent of the stock, making the recent Berkshire purchase “among the top three” of Nalco stock. The 8.7 million shares reflect the company’s holdings in Nalco as of Dec. 31.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=NLC+Major+Holders

Nalco Holding Co. (NLC)

Major Holders

New Nalco CEO targets overseas growth
Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL) - Thursday, February 28, 2008
Author: Anna Marie Kukec Daily Herald Business Writer
akukec@@dailyherald.com

Naperville-based Nalco Holding Co. -one of the world’s oldest and largest water chemical firms - said Wednesday it hired a new chief executive with an aggressive eye for growth, especially in China, India and Latin America.

J. Erik Fyrwald, 48, a long-time executive with DuPont, replaces William Joyce, 71, who retired in December. Fyrwald is moving from his Des Moines, Iowa, base, but first he’ll visit Nalco facilities in Texas and overseas to talk with workers and form a new strategy.

“I want to invest more in accelerating our growth,” Fyrwald said during an interview.

Nalco , which turns 80 years old in May, helps customers reduce energy, water and other natural resource consumption, enhance air quality, minimize environmental releases and improve productivity and products. Fyrwald said he experienced this first-hand while leading a DuPont plant in Texas about 20 years ago.

“We were running a manufacturing operation there that used chemicals that produced nylon, but we couldn’t produce enough to meet customer demand,” said Fyrwald. “ Nalco was brought in and they helped us to improve our water system that allowed 20 percent more capacity.”

Fyrwald was happy at DuPont and declined the first overture that Nalco ‘s executive recruiter made last year.

“I wasn’t interested in doing anything else at the time,” said Fyrwald. “But then later I learned it was Nalco and had good experiences with them and thought differently.”

Nalco was founded May 1, 1928, through the merger of Chicago Chemical Co. and Aluminate Sales Corp. It has been bought and sold in recent years with various name changes.

In late 2003, New York investors Blackstone Group, Apollo Management LP and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners acquired the company for about $4.3 billion and brought it public a year later. Its name was then changed again, this time to Nalco Holding.

The work force, about 12,000 in its heyday, is now around 11,500, including 1,100 in Naperville.

Also, Nalco has operations in about 130 countries. It had one plant in China since the 1990s and a second plant is scheduled to open later this year.

Nalco also has been in India since 1988 and in Venezuela, Latin America, since 1958. Fyrwald aims to expand in these regions by adding workers to serve an expanding customer base, he said.

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Matt Rogers: Man with the big green checkbook - Senior adviser to U.S. energy secretary controls billions in spending for Recovery Act projects around country
Chicago Tribune (IL) - Monday, March 22, 2010
Author: Julie Wernau, TRIBUNE REPORTER
You probably don’t know Matt Rogers, but maybe you should. As senior adviser to the secretary of energy for the Recovery Act, Rogers oversees a very big checkbook.

“I am way, way down the pecking list in the Department of Energy,” Rogers told attendees at the Midwest Alternative Energy Venture Forum, hosted by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in November, 274 days after the passage of the Recovery Act.

Down the pecking list? Maybe. But if money talks, he’s talking in billions — $32.7 billion for energy-related projects around the country. Add private capital and other funding sources, and those projects are valued at $100 billion. And not every midlevel bureaucrat has a meeting schedule that includes biweekly face time with the vice president or gets away with calling him “Sheriff Joe.”

In Illinois, $889 million has been awarded so far for energy-related projects through the act, putting the state 28th in the nation for money awarded per capita.

Announced projects include up to $1.7 million for a waste-heat capture project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, $2.2 million for a carbon capture project at Nalco Co. in Naperville, $8.8 million for Argonne National Laboratory to construct three battery research-and-development facilities and $19 million to Northwestern University for research related to solar energy conversion. And there’s millions more for everything from the weatherization of Illinois homes to the cleanup of Cold War-era contamination sites at buildings at Argonne National Laboratory.

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A sampling of Illinois projects awarded DOE funding

* $7.9 million to the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago to fund a wind energy consortia between institutions of higher learning and industry. Research will focus on improving wind-turbine performance and reliability.

* $4.5 million to Commonwealth Edison in Chicago for a Smart Grid solar pilot program that would test solar photovoltaic systems and real-time metering at the homes of certain customers and allow them to receive credit for generating electricity for the grid.

* $2.5 million to Indie Energy Systems Company LLC in Evanston to help convert the heating and cooling system at the Local 150 International Union of Operating Engineers office in Countryside to a geothermal system that uses smart meters.

* $35 million to Toda America Inc. in Schaumburg, a subsidiary of Toda Kogyo Corp. in Japan, to help fund the construction of a manufacturing plant in Battle Creek, Mich., that produces batteries for electric vehicles.

* $99 million to Argonne National Laboratory, near Lemont, to clean up several of Argonne ‘s former nuclear research facilities.

* $2.2 million to Nalco Co. in Naperville to fund a partnership with Argonne National Laboratory to test an electrochemical process to capture carbon dioxide from coal-fired plants.

* $2.4 million to the Gas Technology Institute in Des Plaines to complete preliminary engineering for a process that would produce gasoline and diesel from woody biomass, agricultural residues and algae.

http://www.suntimes.com/technology/guy/2276694,CST-NWS-ECOL15.article

Argonne has received $187 million in Recovery Act funding since March 2009

http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=385268

Local experts stand ready to help in Gulf oil crisis

Published: 6/3/2010 12:01 AM

Argonne National Laboratory has been waiting in the wings to help resolve the BP oil leak crisis in the Gulf of Mexico.

Argonne was among a list of national labs submitted to BP to provide expertise and scientific assistance, said Department of Energy spokesman Brian Quirke, who is based in DuPage County.

But BP and the Deepwater Horizon Response team, which includes several agencies and groups, have yet to call upon Argonne, which has about 200 research groups on a broad range of disciplines. This includes scientific modeling and capabilities to understand the oil plumes and their effects.

“Argonne remains ready,” Quirke said.

When President Obama recently announced that all federal resources would be focused on stopping the massive oil leak, which has reached epic proportions and expense, the labs were geared up as part of that solution.

DOE has assembled a team of scientists, including more than 200 personnel from national labs, to analyze the response efforts and recommend options to stop the oil leak. This included recommendations that BP use high-energy gamma rays to image parts of equipment involved in the leak. Some labs have independently analyzed the two-dimensional gamma ray images, which are crucial in helping to understand what is happening, DOE said.

Many DOE officials and scientists from various labs are already at the gulf, Quirke said.

In addition, the experts BP has called upon worldwide include those from its Naperville and Warrenville operations, said local BP spokesman Scott Dean, who also has been in the gulf since the crisis started April 20.

“This is a global effort,” Dean said while on a boat with a cleanup crew off the coast of Mississippi.

In addition, Naperville-based Nalco Holding Co. continues to provide its Corexit dispersant, despite an earlier controversy that the chemical may have been too toxic for the environment, especially since it is being used in massive quantities to fight the historically large leak.

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