More than 45 people registered for the Jan. 24 site tour and industry briefing on the Tank Closure Contract at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state, including some major contractors in the weapons complex.
Companies represented at the gathering included: AECOM; AVANTech; Bechtel; Booz Allen Hamilton; BWX Technologies; Columbia Energy and Environmental Services; Fluor; Honeywell; Jacobs; James Fischer Technologies; Longenecker & Associates; Navarro Research and Engineering; S&R Sheet Metal; TerraGraphics Environmental Engineering; TradeWind Services; and Veolia Nuclear Solutions Federal Services.
The names were recently posted on the DOE Environmental Management procurement website, along with a slide presentation on the 177 tanks covered under the contract – 149 single-shell tanks and 28 double-shell tanks. The winning vendor would work with the Office of River Protection to treat, store, and retrieve Hanford tank waste.
“All the usual suspects” showed up, said one industry source who attended. If the Energy Department hopes its new end state contracting approach will attract a new crop of bidders, there is little evidence of that so far, he added.
The agency has sought feedback on a master indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for tank closure that would implement the end state contract approach, which DOE has said will be more flexible and offer higher potential fees for contractors than many of the existing contracts across the weapons complex. The goal of this philosophy is to speed remediation and reduce the agency’s environmental liability.
The top potential fee for tank closure is 15 percent, about twice as much as now available, the source said. To get the top of the scale, however, a contractor would likely have to do the work for significantly less than its initial estimate, he added. The Hanford tank contract could have a potential value of between $10 billion and $15 billion, according to the latest DOE Office of Environmental Management procurement schedule issued in November.
The source believes he and many industry colleagues are not entirely up to speed yet on how the end state IDIQ approach will work.
The Energy Department seemingly plans to make a 10-year, multibillion-dollar commitment to a contractor team based on bids on one or two task orders – rather than a long laundry list of work over the course of the contract. But the contractor’s management might prefer a more detailed accounting of what the company is committing to do years into the contract, the source said.
The current tank-farm manager, AECOM-led Washington River Protection Solutions, will remain on the job at least until September after receiving a one-year, $629 million extension to its 10-year, $6.3 billion contract. The Energy Department plans to issue a final request for proposals by the end of this month, with hopes of issuing a new contract by mid-2020.
