Gulf ‘s Postwar Cleanup Never Took Off : Environment: Most U.S. firms hoping for a Mideast contract bonanza are still waiting for the action to begin.

The bonanza that many U.S. companies once saw in the oily environmental wounds of the Persian Gulf has yet to materialize.

Lacking are both the will and the way. Gulf nations have neither placed a priority on environmental repair nor provided the money to fund expensive cleanups, according to disappointed environmental-services firms.

Only a few large companies that perform the environmental equivalent of crisis intervention have gained contracts in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.

One of these, Oakland-based Crowley Maritime Inc.--which has used its barges, tugs and marine salvage equipment to clean up oil spills all over the world--did well as a prime contractor on the Persian Gulf spill.

Richard A. Simpson, senior vice president of the privately held firm, declined to reveal figures. But he conceded that Crowley had no trouble getting a contract from the Saudi Arabian government, noting that the firm has worked in the kingdom in different joint ventures since the 1970s. In all its operations, the 5,000-employee company grossed $1.2 billion in sales last year.

Yet now that free-floating oil has been removed from Saudi coastal waters, Crowley too is reduced to acting as a consultant to the Saudi government as it decides how far it will go in cleaning up its oil-stained beaches.

Anchorage, Alaska-based Martech U.S.A. Inc., which provides crews for the grimy groundwork, was on the job in Saudi Arabia while Scud missiles were passing overhead. Martech also helped revive public services in Kuwait, including city garbage-handling facilities.

Chairman Ben Tisdale said Martech billed $7 million for cleanup work around the Gulf in 1991. Convinced that the Saudis will scour their beaches, he expects to do up to $22 million in Saudi Arabia alone in 1992.

“We have no guarantee that we’ll get that $22 million,” Tisdale admitted, declining to go into details, “just that we’ll get our fair share of it.”

Most U.S. environmental companies looking for work after the war have been far less successful.

Many had counted on continued financial aid from the allied coalition nations. When that didn’t come, rumors abounded that Japan would step in. After all, the Japanese had given $1.5 million to the Gulf Oil Pollution Disaster Fund, administered by the International Maritime Organization, and $1.11 million to the United Nations Environment Program’s efforts to map the extent of the ecological damage.

“But given economic problems worldwide,” said Richard Golob, an oil-pollution expert, “it’s highly unlikely that the region will receive any international funding for a continued response.”

Golob, publisher of Golob’s Oil Pollution Bulletin, is working on another avenue of hope for these companies--advising the U.N.-organized Regional Organization for the Protection of the Marine Environment and the Kuwait Environmental Protection Council as they draft a damage assessment of Kuwait’s environment.

Some now see the best source of money for substantial environmental cleanup in a fund that would accrue if Iraq’s Saddam Hussein changes his mind and sells Iraqi oil under terms of the U.N. Security Council resolutions passed after the war to set terms for Iraq’s reintegration into the world community.

That resolution allows Iraq to export oil worth $1.6 billion as long as the money is spent in certain ways. In one provision, 30% of the money would go into a fund to compensate Kuwait and other Gulf nations for war damages to government facilities, businesses, individuals and--last and probably least--the environment. Well-documented damage assessments would be vital to extracting such money from the U.N. claims commission, should Hussein decide to play along.

Meanwhile, neither Kuwait nor Saudi Arabia is directing money to major environmental cleanup work.

Kuwait has asked for bids to recover the estimated 70 million to 100 million barrels of free oil left in sprawling lakes around its fields. But it has sought no bids to clean up the soaked sand beneath.

“Once again, the focus of the Kuwaitis is on producing oil,” Golob said, “not rehabilitating the environment.”

In Saudi Arabia late last year, San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp., the U.S. giant that played major administrative roles in both Saudi Arabia’s Gulf cleanup effort and the extinguishing of Kuwait’s oil fires, proposed a $450-million plan to clean up the 400 miles of oil-soaked Saudi beaches.

But Golob and others believe that so grand an effort may just be wishful thinking, considering other war-related demands on the country’s budget. The Saudis’ interest in the coastline ended abruptly, by most accounts, after they spent an estimated $150 million to remove loose oil from their coastal waters and to protect vital desalination plants and refineries.

The great hope for smaller U.S. environmental-services companies had been bio-remediation--that is, using biological, rather than physical or chemical, oil cleanup techniques.

In Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, U.S. firms proposed using microbes to ingest and transform spilled oil and its residue into harmless substances. The basic idea has been used and is now being aggressively marketed in the United States but is still almost unknown around the Persian Gulf.

But no bio-remediation companies got contracts.

“And we really have no idea why,” said John Zeiner, a spokesman for Austin, Tex.-based Alpha Environmental Inc.

Zeiner and others speculate that Saudi and Kuwaiti officials were reluctant to embrace a relatively new technology and were more interested in reconstruction than environmental cleanup. Moreover, they said, “things move slowly over there.”

Still others believe that the Saudis and Kuwaitis, so economically dependent on oil production, may not have wanted those bugs too close to their national treasure.

“There was a common, if unfounded, concern that the microbes wouldn’t stop at the shoreline,” Golob said.

Some U.S. companies are staying the course, convinced that work is just around the corner.

An oil-coagulant powder being marketed as Elastol is still being flogged around the Gulf by General Technology Applications Inc. of Manassas, Va.

‘We went over and did demonstrations, spent a lot of time there, shipped material over, lined up support, but never did any work at all,” said Jerry Trippe, General Technology president. “But we were still trying as of last week.”

Alpha, too, still has representatives in the Mideast, however, its sights refocused from oil lakes and the Gulf spill to more modest work--cleaning waste-water and trash-handling facilities, contaminated refinery pipelines and small patches of polluted ground water and soil.

“I strongly believe that there is a chance for work there,” Zeiner said. “Maybe not as catastrophically large as we were looking at a year ago, but maybe something more permanent and long-term.”

Yet there are other impediments to securing clean-up contracts.

“The (U.S.) Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. government played a hands-off role in the remediation efforts, so they did not assist American companies in getting their services to the front,” said Edgar Berkey, president of National Environmental Technology Applications Corp. NETAC was set up in 1988 by the EPA to help commercialize just such technologies as bio-remediation.

Berkey cites a U.S. policy decision to support but take no lead in any environmental cleanup of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Indeed, in the Dammam headquarters of the Saudi Meteorology and Environmental Protection Administration, U.S. Coast Guard oil-spill experts routinely described themselves to reporters last spring as being on a “stealth” assignment.

Berkey also said that the Coast Guard has traditionally preferred mechanical cleanup methods over oil-eating bugs.

And that there has been wide speculation that the Saudis particularly--who have ignored numerous Persian Gulf oil spills in the past--were reluctant to set a new precedent with a massive response this time.