CH2M Hill

History

CH2M was founded in 1946 in Corvallis, Oregon by Oregon State University civil engineering professor Fred Merryfield and three of his students: Holly Cornell, James Howland and Thomas Burke Hayes (the firm was named after the founders, with Howland and Hayes making up the H2 portion). Cornell, Howland, and Hayes were all graduates of Oregon State University. The company became CH2M Hill name after a 1971 merger with Clair A. Hill and Associates of Redding, California. The firm remained headquartered in Oregon until 1980, when a decision was made to relocate to Colorado, a more central location in the United States.

Services

The company operates in multiple business units, among the operating divisions, Water, Energy & Facilities; Government, Environment & Infrastructure; and International. Business groups served include: Water; Transportation; Operations and Maintenance; Government Facilities and Infrastructure; Nuclear; Environmental; Energy and Chemicals; Power; and Industrial and Advanced Technology.

The company developed, maintains and publishes its own method for managing projects for clients, called the CH2M Hill Project Delivery System, which may be found at popular internet book retailers. As a firm specializing in project management, CH2M Hill has been associated in several large, complex projects around the world. In 2005, a CH2M Hill joint-venture known as Kaiser-Hill decommissioned and closed a former nuclear weapons facility at the Rocky Flats site in Colorado (former Rocky Flats Plant).

In Singapore, the company was part of a joint venture to replace the country's sanitary services infrastructure. The new Singapore Deep Tunnel System was designed to improve reliability, ease, and economy of operation, and to help handle Singapore's increasing waterfront utilization. CH2M Hill assisted in reconstruction efforts along the US Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Its main assignments included providing temporary housing, debris removal, and other services.

Other large projects include a $660 million gas-fired power plant in Australia, in conjunction with General Electric, and an $11.7 billion project to relocate American military bases in Korea. In August 2007, the Panama Canal Authority selected CH2M Hill to manage the $5.25 billion Panama Canal expansion project, which will add new locks to the Pacific and Atlantic ends of the canal and allow Post Panamax ships passage through the canal for the first time. In 2009, a CH2M Hill consortium was named program partner to oversee construction of the Crossrail project to expand London’s transit system.

On August 30, 2006, as part of joint venture CLM, CH2M Hill was a supplier for the London 2012 Olympics. The other two members of the venture are project management service provider Mace Group and Laing O'Rourke, the largest privately owned construction firm in the UK.

The company manages projects for the clients, taking into account the environmental footprint, aiming to use sustainable technology. The firm reduced its own internal environmental footprint in 2011.

In 2008, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) contracted a CH2M Hill company, CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Company, LLC (CHPRC), to manage deconstruction and remediation of the Central Plateau on the Hanford Nuclear Site in eastern Washington, one of the world’s largest environmental cleanup projects. The project focused on shrinking the environmental footprint of the Hanford Site from a 586-square-mile (1,520 km²) area (large enough to fit the city of Los Angeles) to 75 square miles (190 km²) or less. More importantly, the project will reduce legacy infrastructure costs on site by more than $25 million per year starting in 2015. Using American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding, CHPRC sped up cleanup of the site over two years, reducing the site footprint 25 percent, employing an additional 1,350 people in the process. When ARRA funded work concludes in September 2012, the site footprint was targeted to shrink to a total of 290 square miles (750 km²), roughly half its previous size. Without ARRA funding, however, the scope of DOE contracted work at Hanford will be reduced. The company also announced that its workforce would reduce by up to 1,350 workers later that year through a combination of voluntary and involuntary separations.

In February 2012, the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee appointed the company to manage the delivery of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.

CH2M HILL are the developers of Flood Modeller Pro, an industry-leading flood risk modelling and real-time flood forecasting suite of software.

Acquisitions

Key acquisitions include Black, Crow & Eidsness (a southeast U.S. engineering firm) in 1977, Gore & Storrie (a Canadian water and wastewater engineering firm) in 1995, Gee & Jensen (a Florida-based Ports and Harbor firm) in 2002, DeMil International (a U.S.-based weapons destruction firm) in 2002, EHS Consultants Ltd (a Hong Kong-based consulting firm), Lockwood Greene, the oldest continuously operating professional services firm in the United States in 2003, and BBS Corporation (an Ohio-based environmental engineering firm) in 2005. On September 7, 2007, CH2M HILL finalized the purchase of most of the components of VECO, an Alaska-based firm specializing in services to the oil, gas, and energy sector that had become embroiled in the Alaska political corruption probe. In December 2007, CH2M Hill acquired Trigon EPC. In March 2008, CH2M Hill acquired Texas-based Goldston Engineering, a company specializing in marine and coastal transportation engineering services. In July 2011, CH2M Hill finalized the acquisition of Booz Allen Hamilton’s State & Local Government Transportation Consulting (S&L Transportation) business. In September 2011, CH2M Hill announced that it intended to acquire the share capital of Halcrow Group Limited, a UK-based engineering consultancy that operates worldwide. The acquisition for £124m was completed on November 10, 2011. In 2014, CH2M Hill acquired TERA Environmental Consultants of Calgary, Alberta.