Top Innovators
Brian Martin is the Senior Manager of Environmental Services at Ameren. Brandon Teel is a senior engineer, geologist and branch manager for the St. Louis, Missouri office at GEI Consultants. Dan Wilkens is a Partner at ERM: Environmental Resources Management.
Ameren won the Fortnightly Top Innovator 2025 award ''Nancy Fitzroy Top Innovator in Environment and Safety'' for its In-Situ Stabilization to Isolate Groundwater's Subsurface Soil Impacts.
PUF's Lori Burkhart: Describe your role in the innovation and its positive impact.
Ameren's Brian Martin: I'm the Senior Manager of Environmental Services at Ameren. Along with other things I do, I'm also the Program Manager for our Manufactured Gas Plant (MGP) Remediation. The Taylorville project is forty years old, and I've been with the project since the beginning, when I started my career at Illinois EPA.
Along the way, it became a CERCLA site, so it's a federal Superfund project. The approved remedy is groundwater treatment, and that's what we've been pursuing for nearly forty years.
In 2023, we wanted to think about this project in a new way by taking advantage of advancements in technology developed over the past forty years. Our goal was to implement the most effective solutions available, ensuring that customers and community benefit from the latest progress in groundwater treatment and site remediation.
We received approval to do a pilot study on using In-Situ Stabilization (ISS) to bind any remaining impacts in the subsurface, stop the release to groundwater, and eliminate potential impacts to the environment or the neighboring community.