Almost as soon as he graduated from Connecticut College — where he played basketball with the guy who’d go on to found Beyond Meat: the plant-based hamburger-ish patty — Mark Fallon started working for the Department of Energy.
“I started my career at DOE,” Fallon told Weapons Complex Monitor. “I worked in the secretary’s office and I worked in the Office of Environmental Management (EM). And this, to me, highlights the amazing work that the sort of career folks, civil servants, at DOE do.”
In a way, Fallon still works at DOE. And he’d like more work.
The company has a toehold at EM, which it found two years before Fallon arrived after partnering with North Wind and clinching a $92 million DOE contract to build the Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
But Aptim’s work in the nuclear world is mostly with the Department of Defense these days. The company last year won a $129-million contract to decommission the Navy’s Surface Ship Support Barge. In August, an Aptim-AECOM team was awarded a since-protested contract by the Army Corps of Engineers to decommission the retired SM-1 power reactor at Fort Belvoir, Va.
Still, Fallon thinks Aptim can penetrate deeper into the DOE Environment Management (EM) business. He spoke recently about that idea in a 30-minute video call from the company’s satellite office in Denver.
WCM: Tell me a little bit about Aptim and its legacy companies.
Fallon: We were carved out of CB&I and parts of the Shaw Group also, what was known as Shaw Environment and Infrastructure, and we are still headquartered, proudly, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as Shaw was before. Louisiana is home to us. It is home to about 1,500 of the women and men who work for us and it’s a really important part of our resilience business. We’re about 6,000 employees altogether.
About how much business is Aptim doing these days?
In our federal business, which is the majority of our business this year [2020], we’ll do about $1.3 billion in top-line. The part of our business which is radiological or nuclear is all environmental. We don’t do any sort of nuclear power, or very little of it, and only a little bit of the operations and maintenance stuff for nuclear power stations. Our biggest customer for nuclear decommissioning currently is actually the DOD, in the form of the decommissioning of retired Navy vessels.
The DOE market is a great market and I would say we’re an ascendent player but not a large player in that market today.
Aptim’s owned by private equity now. Does that feel like a disadvantage? Do you feel like the DOE or DOD is wondering whether you’ll be spun off in a few years?
Private equity ownership in some form is endemic now in our economy and it is here to stay in the DOE complex and across federal management, and that’s a fact. Long before Aptim was created, that was a fact.
Veritas Capital, who is our sponsor, specializes in portfolio companies that are government-services and technology companies, so they are really, really familiar and expert in owning and supporting businesses that rely on these longer policy trends and procurement cycles.
And look, if the current capital markets are any indication, there is no capital structure that is immune to change. I spent a lot of my career with CH2M, a great company, one of the largest employee-owned companies in the world. It’s now a public business, part of Jacobs — another great company, but it’s public.
And so the ownership or capital structure of the contractors in DOE does not necessarily correlate to a level of stability or instability, in my judgement.
Aptim-Northwind already has the Mercury Outfall construction contract at Y-12. Is Aptim part of a team for the greater Oak Ridge cleanup contract that’s coming after the UCOR contract ends?
My ability to sort of elaborate on where we are in that teaming arrangement is limited by the obligations we have to our potential partners, but I would say that, look, I think that whether it’s Aptim or other firms, I think it’s a really, really important mission for the department and for the company.
But it’s fair to say that you’d like to win some more business from the DOE Office of Environmental Management?
I think it would benefit from more players. There are some really great firms that have been serving that EM market for a long time and they’ve done a super job and they’re really capable, but look, the general laws of economics should apply to this market as well, which is, you get more innovation by having more involvement from more firms. And that’s quite apart from Aptim’s interest.
And so our hope is that there’ll be an opportunity for capable firms with something to offer in terms of smart women and men, good ideas, proven experiences, and that that aperture of competition will open a little bit wider in the DOE EM market.
[Look at] Moderna. Moderna is one of the firms that brought us a COVID-19 vaccine. Moderna is a relatively new company, so we’re seeing not only the ability of institutions to solve big, technical problems like a COVID vaccine by relying on really esteemed firms like Pfizer, but also on new firms.
So It seems to me that I’d like to see the DOE open the aperture to new ideas, new men and women through their contractors community. Whether that benefits Aptim specifically or not, that’s up to us, right? But I think in general, the mission would be well-served by trying to make it more permeable to some new ideas.
