While consumers mull over hybrid cars and solar panels, Alberta companies are making decisions. Environmental performance has arrived. “It’s built right in,” Don Quist says in describing emerging green standard operating procedures and equipment that his firm has a role in putting into industrial sites.

“Safety had to become part of the culture,” recalls the veteran of construction and energy projects since the 1980s. “Green is going to become part of the culture. It takes time to create. But it’s already gone past just being trendy.”

Putting environmental theory into practice can be a livelihood, says Quist. He participates in the evolution of paid green know-how as managing director of Hood Group, a 100-employee technical, engineering, construction management and environmental consulting firm that has won national recognition for enlightened personnel practices. The outfit’s Sherwood Park headquarters is a short hop from the refinery row of tank farms, processing plants and pipeline terminals that dominates Edmonton’s eastern skyline.

Environmental work is routine in the heavy industrial district. “It’s as much a mainstay of Hood as safety is. Efficiency and reliability are big issues. Green is going to be no different,” Quist says. Only part of the need to run clean shows itself in prosecutions and fines against Fort McMurray bitumen mines for construction camp spills and tailings pond mistakes that might have been shrugged off two decades ago as regrettable but small prices to pay for progress. Fallen oil and natural gas revenues, aggravated by the global credit crisis, are making plant improvements that simultaneously cut costs and reduce environmental damage into an economic survival strategy.

“Lean and mean now has to incorporate green,” Hood engineer Caroline Martel says. “It’s widespread in all industries now,” agrees Trevor McCallion, Hood’s president and chief operating officer.

Land and water pollution cleanups, from reclaiming contaminated soil in California to sealing abandoned oil wells in northern Alberta, are old hat to Martel. Next comes clearing the air. She predicts cutting greenhouse gas emissions will become a routine item in engineering’s bread-and-butter role of “optimization,” or extracting the greatest possible value from equipment and resources.

“If you’re looking at making something more efficient, ultimately the carbon emissions will be reduced,” Martel says. Cutting energy consumption, and therefore exhaust vented into the atmosphere, is a natural outcome of cost control.

At industrial establishments built on the international scale in Edmonton and northern Alberta, small modifications of standard operating procedures have big results. Quist recalls effects that apparently trivial changes had at oil sands plants during the 1980s bout of austerity brought on by energy price lows.

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