Should the proposed merger announced last week between Amentum and Jacobs Solutions’s government contracting business become reality, most Department of Energy nuclear cleanup contracts will be held by teams where the lead partner has a publicly-traded corporate parent.
That is based on a cursory review of contracts, valued at nearly $1 billion or more, which are administered by the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
Dallas-based Jacobs is already publicly-traded, and will retain ownership over more than half of the combined company, but Amentum will once again be part of a parent that’s publicly traded on the stock market.
Virginia-based Amentum, privately owned by a pair of New York-based investment firms, is lead partner on about $34 billion worth of Environmental Management joint ventures. The $34-billion figure includes the almost $6-billion decommissioning contract awarded in July for the Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
Amentum-led teams have the $10 billion liquid waste tank management contract and the $10-billion Central Plateau Cleanup contract at the DOE’s Hanford Site in Washington state as well as the $8.3-billion cleanup contract at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee.
Amentum plans to merge with the Critical Mission Solutions and Cyber-Intelligence branches of Dallas-based Jacobs Solutions. Jacobs-led teams now account for about $3.5 billion of EM contracts, according to the latest major contracts chart.
The existing Jacobs-led projects include Idaho National Laboratory cleanup along with remediation contracts at the Paducah Site in Kentucky and the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York state.
With Amentum going public from privately-held, Virginia-based Bechtel National would again be the largest privately-held player in EM contracts. Bechtel has both the $15.5 billion contract for construction of the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant at Hanford as well as the $3-billion contract for management of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
The operations under the current Amentum banner have been publicly traded in the not-too-distant past while they were still a branch of Los Angeles-based AECOM. A few years ago, publicly-traded Fluor announced plans to spin-off its government contracting business, but later dropped the plan. Also, about six years ago, Jacobs acquired a rival company, CH2M.
