Black & Veatch

• 1. Introduction

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  Black and Veatch began with twelve employees and a handshake in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1915. Two engineers, Ernest Bateman Black and Nathan Thomas Veatch, had met at the University of Kansas, and when Black dissolved an earlier partnership, he chose Veatch to build something new with him. More than a century later, the firm they founded has completed projects in more than 100 countries on six continents, and it ranks as the fifth-largest fully employee-owned company in the United States. How did a small Kansas City partnership grow into one of the largest engineering firms in the world? What kind of work does it actually do, and why does its name appear in government biosecurity contracts, military installations, and conspiracy theories about Ukraine? The answers stretch from Arkansas training camps during World War Two to a Bio-Safety Level 3 laboratory on the outskirts of Kyiv.

• 2. From Two Names to a Global Firm

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  Ernest Bateman Black and Nathan Thomas Veatch first formed their partnership in 1915 with just twelve people on the payroll. Their early work was local, but the firm's profile changed sharply when the War Department came calling in 1940. Black and Veatch was asked to rebuild Camp Robinson in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the contracts kept coming: Camp Chaffee in Fort Smith, Arkansas; Camp Hale in Pando, Colorado; and other military installations across the Midwest. That wartime trust carried into peacetime nuclear work. In 1948, the firm began working for the Atomic Energy Commission at Los Alamos, New Mexico. N.T. Veatch himself rose to national prominence, and in 1950 President Harry Truman appointed him to the President's Water Pollution Control Advisory Board. By 1963, the firm had grown large enough to spin off Black and Veatch International as a separate entity, and the following year it opened its first regional office in Denver, Colorado, to design a water treatment plant capable of handling 100 million gallons per day.

• 3. Power, Water, and Global Reach

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  A 60-megawatt power generating unit for the Yanhee Electricity Authority of Thailand, awarded in 1967, signaled the firm's growing presence in international energy markets. The authority is now known as EGAT, the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand. Water infrastructure grew alongside energy work. In 1995, Black and Veatch merged with Binnie and Partners, adding significant water expertise, and the following year it acquired Paterson Candy Ltd., a UK-based water treatment contractor, more than doubling its existing UK water operations. In 2008, Eskom selected Black and Veatch to provide project management and engineering services for a 4,800-megawatt power generation facility in South Africa. The firm's UK water businesses eventually passed to RSK Group in 2021 and were renamed Binnies. According to Engineering News-Record magazine, Black and Veatch ranked as the 13th-largest design firm in the United States by revenue for design services in 2024, the 4th largest provider to the power market, and the 8th largest in water.

• 4. Employee Ownership and Structure

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  In 1999, Black and Veatch converted from a general partnership into an employee-owned corporation. That structural shift placed ownership in the hands of the people doing the work rather than outside shareholders. By October 2025, the company employed approximately 13,000 people and reported total revenue of $4.735 billion. Its principal offices are now at 11401 Lamar Avenue in Overland Park, Kansas, a building the firm first moved into in 1976, later sold, and then repurchased in 2009 to designate as its World Headquarters. Steve Edwards served as Chairman, President, and CEO from 2013 until his retirement, when Mario Azar succeeded him as Chairman and CEO in 2022. The firm operates more than 100 offices worldwide and has branched well beyond traditional engineering into advisory services, smart cities, cybersecurity, and electrified transportation.

• 5. Biosecurity Work in Ukraine

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  In 2008, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency awarded Black and Veatch the first of its Biological Threat Reduction Integrating Contracts, known as BTRIC. The five-year indefinite-delivery contract carried a collective ceiling of $4 billion spread across five selected contractors. Black and Veatch served as the Integrating Contractor for the first BTRIC in Ukraine, working alongside three Implementing Agents: the Ukraine Ministry of Health, the Ukraine Academy of Agrarian Sciences, and the Ukraine State Committee for Veterinary Medicine. In 2010, the firm commissioned Ukraine's first Bio-Safety Level 3 laboratory, the first BSL-3 facility completed under DTRA oversight. Ukrainian personnel received three years of training in molecular diagnostics, biosafety, operations, and laboratory management, running from 2010, so that Ukrainian scientists could independently manage both the laboratory and the country's wider biosurveillance network. The project's stated aim was to renovate a decades-old facility into a state-of-the-art diagnostics hub at the center of that network.

• 6. Conspiracy Claims and the Public Record

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  Social media users have attempted to connect Black and Veatch's biosurveillance work in Ukraine to theories about the origins of COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine. The Associated Press reported the underlying facts directly: the U.S. government initially signed an agreement in late 2019 with Black and Veatch as part of biological threat reduction work in Ukraine. After the pandemic began, Black and Veatch hired another firm, Labyrinth Gold Health, to provide expertise for Ukraine's COVID-19 response. The description of the work in a federal database was updated to reflect that new scope, but the original agreement date was not changed. That unchanged date, sitting alongside a modified project description, became the raw material for misleading claims. The actual contractual record, as described by officials and documents cited by the Associated Press, shows standard government contracting practice, not concealed activity. Black and Veatch formally announced in 2020 that it was ceasing participation in new coal-based design and construction projects, a separate pivot that signaled where the company was directing its future work.

• 7. New Directions

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  Bird Electric Enterprises, a Texas-based electrical contractor and storm restoration specialist, joined Black and Veatch in 2023, adding around 600 employees. That same year, the firm completed a charging depot for Schneider National to support Schneider's zero-emissions fleet. In 2017, Black and Veatch launched Diode Ventures, LLC, described as a vehicle to provide clients with a full-service solution to develop and manage their infrastructure assets; Brad Hardin, the firm's Global Chief Technology Officer, became its president. A 2018 report on the Missouri Hyperloop, produced jointly with the University of Missouri, pointed toward the firm's interest in next-generation transportation. In 2024, Black and Veatch established a global Operational Technology cybersecurity practice specifically aimed at protecting critical infrastructure from hackers and cybercriminals, a line of business that places the firm at the intersection of physical infrastructure and digital security, where much of the industry's near-term risk now lives.