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E1: How are underwater tunnels built?
90 Plays3 years ago
In this episode Carlos & Jason chat through how teams go about sinking tunnels, playing underwater football and the tech needed to remove busywork in construction.
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Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Launch Banter
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi everyone and welcome to the Offsite Podcast where we give you our raw and honest takes on hot stories at the intersection of construction and technology. My name's Carlos and I spend every day talking to construction teams about how they deliver projects. And I am Jason and I spend all day building software that construction teams use to deliver projects.
00:00:20
Speaker
Today is our first episode. Super exciting, but we're totally new to this. It will probably suck, but let's see how we go. I don't know what to do with my hands. Yeah, also sweating, right? Extra romantic as it's Valentine's Day, and I get to stare at a six foot seven Australian man for the next 30 minutes. Complete accident.
Iconic Projects: The Line & Mega Tunneling
00:00:39
Speaker
Yeah, well done. In this episode, we're going to be, we've got three topics. The first is about the line, which is the sort of major aspect of the NEON project over in Saudi Arabia.
00:00:49
Speaker
The second, there was recently a bomb that actually went off on a construction site over in Yarmouth. And we'll be finishing up talking about two mega tunneling projects. Sydney's Western Harbour Tunnel, which recently had a massive change in construction methodology, and Femmarn Link, a huge project connecting Denmark and Germany. So, to kick off with the line.
00:01:12
Speaker
Massive scheme, 500 billion dollars. Some of the stats are crazy. The sheer scale of it, the line itself is 170 kilometre long structure. It's 500 metres tall, 200 metres wide. And I read just the other day that one section, the world's biggest cruise liner, can turn around inside of it.
00:01:29
Speaker
Every contract that seems to get let on that project is the world's largest. I saw the world's largest tunneling contract let, and then the world's largest hydrogen plant contract let. The scale of the project is hard to comprehend. I think I saw on LinkedIn, in terms of people, because I think we'd see people getting sucked from all over the world onto that project. Already, there's something like, for the client side, a neon project. There's something like 3,500 people on LinkedIn in that company.
00:01:59
Speaker
Do you see lots of people getting taken over to that project? Yeah, it seems to be a real problem with particularly senior leads on within contractors at the moment. So seeing lots of people duck away from either major projects or major contractors. Across UK, Europe, definitely I've seen in Australia. Yeah, presumably they're having to do the old shift working like Australian mining type jobs where you're going over for. I think it's a long term fly and fly out normally, like three months on, maybe two weeks or a month off or something like that.
00:02:29
Speaker
What's super interesting for the project I was reading, the project value is something like 500 billion pounds. And then they expect the project to contribute something like 48 billion to Saudi Arabia GDP. And I think they say create like 300,000 jobs. But when you think about that and you go from an investment perspective, you're like, well, if you're investing 500 billion and you're increasing, GDP would be equivalent to, say, revenue.
00:02:56
Speaker
So let's say you increase your revenue by $48 billion, say generously 5% net profit margin on that. So you're making a couple of billion a year. I think the payback period is like 200 years.
00:03:12
Speaker
on the 500 billion outlay. Yeah, luckily that Suffolk World Fund is pretty big. I've got some stats here. I was talking to someone who works with one of the major contractors there at the moment.
Tech & Management in Large-scale Construction
00:03:23
Speaker
And just over the next 24 months, 54 million cubes of earth to be excavated, 48,000 piles to be installed, 20 million cube of concrete,
00:03:35
Speaker
and 6.5 million tonnes of rebar. Where do you even start? How do you manage that? It must be by breaking it down into some pretty massive
00:03:51
Speaker
like EPC contracts. I don't even know how you would coordinate that size of a project. We've seen a lot of how like high speed 2 operates but this is like almost order of magnitude larger isn't it? Yeah, they say here HST is sucking up everyone but just to deliver that alone and that's just the groundwork for the line which is only one section of NEOM.
00:04:16
Speaker
HS2 is building a rail line, NEOM is building a country. Yeah, absolutely. And they claim 9 million people will live in the line, which is pretty nuts. Did I read correctly that it's only 200 meters wide? 200 meters wide, 500 meters tall, 170 kilometers long. Unreal. Yeah. Say you had to go there as a project manager or even your backhand as a quality player. How do you even think about the delivery of that project?
00:04:46
Speaker
yeah like first principles type like you would have to use just to bring on like the technology you have to use technology in almost every aspect of the delivery of the project because everything like you just think about like the projects anything like quality records or anything that uh on a lot of projects today are still like heavily paper-based the amount of like paperwork for quality lots being closed out
00:05:14
Speaker
material compliance records being approved. Yeah, if you think about any process on a normal construction project, that would be stressed if you pushed it to like billions of pounds, if we use pounds as the marker.
00:05:31
Speaker
things that you would have seen on Crossrail that were like, this was a lot of extra work because of how big the project was, where you suddenly take, if you compare an individual section of Crossrail that might have been a couple of billion pounds, and then you project that to like $500 billion, so like hundreds of billions of pounds.
00:05:53
Speaker
Almost everything that you would have had to do would have had to leverage technology to remove any of the repetitive busy work. You used to tell me about what you'd have to do for subcontractor claims in a spreadsheet.
00:06:09
Speaker
Yeah. On Crossrail. Yeah. You amplify that by a factor of 10. Do you think there is an organization will dictate technology across supply chain? Or do you think it's going to be contracts, delivering their contract in the way that they're? Well, I don't know. Like, I guess the root problem is if there's 10, 20 times as much work to do, do you get 10 or 20 times more people?
00:06:35
Speaker
Are there that many people that can deliver? Because at the same time that this project's being delivered, you've got High Speed 2 still ramping up in the UK. The amount of work happening across Sydney, Melbourne, Australia, they're still a fraction of what's happening in the entire world. So the demand on experienced people
00:06:52
Speaker
There's only so much that people can poach people from other projects. Yeah. So yeah, you take any process that you would have had to do on HS2 in a spreadsheet where you would spend, I don't know, per subcontractor a couple of hours a month or a week, and then you times that by hundreds and hundreds of quantity surveyors. It's just the amount of time that would be wasted if everything wasn't totally efficient.
00:07:20
Speaker
the old return on investment calculations for software would be nuts on that project. Yeah, yeah. You say X number of hours per person times by 7,000 people in this role. Yeah. Well, I'm hearing that there are certain aspects that they are trying to procure as client in terms of software. So it'd be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of years when the groundworks and piling really start to kick off.
00:07:45
Speaker
There's a lot of American contractors seem to be in there. And I don't know if there's a lack of major infrastructure projects over there, or it's just too big to ignore. But it'd be interesting to see how it's actually delivered. Because the scale is you can't get your head around it. And imagine we see a project now, and they've got 200 engineers. A bit of cadence or routine around 200 engineers is a big jump up, let alone having seven, probably even 15,000 people in terms of white collar office stuff.
00:08:14
Speaker
let alone where you'd expect hundreds of thousands on site, wouldn't you? And there's certain methods in construction that are more progressive. If you assume they took on the bleeding edge of what's being used, there's lots of projects or big Earthworks projects that are tracking truck movements and volumes by weighing the loads and tracking volumes.
00:08:36
Speaker
Like I know there was a case study for a project in Australia that CPB are delivering that is doing exactly that, kind of treating like an earthworks project like a mining site. So you could say that they would do that to save a bunch of like the amount of earthworks, dockets and records of like material being moved would be unreal. But then once you get to something like foundations, piling,
00:09:03
Speaker
Installing rebar, constructing the, I don't know, does anyone know how tall this line is? 500 meters. 500 meters? Tall? It's pretty much as tall as the shard. No. And it's completely mirrored. Can we fact check that, Clay? Let's fact check it.
00:09:21
Speaker
However tall it is, right? It can't be 200 meters wide and 500 meters tall. That's true. It's 200 meters wide and 500 meters tall. That's ridiculous. That's no way. But that's the average. So the part by the ocean I mentioned earlier.
00:09:38
Speaker
you can put the world's biggest cruise ship into the middle of it, and it can turn around and then drive off. That's the port thing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But it's still encased within. But once you, so once you, OK, yeah. But I guess my point was, once you get out of Earthworks and you get into the construction of foundations or the probably concrete structure that they're going to build, I don't know what the method is. The amount of people tying rebar, booking concrete pours, supplying concrete,
00:10:06
Speaker
tiny rebar in the desert. Yeah, it is mind boggling and if you were to do like quality records like checklists and stuff that all has to be digitized because the amount of paper there's just like you'd need that cruise liner to carry the paper records. There'd be that many like being generated. There must be a you said about obviously getting the leading edge tech
00:10:28
Speaker
There's probably a lot of new tech, which will actually probably struggle due to the scale of it, which isn't tried and tested, right? Yeah, massively. It's going to be you buying dreams, and then probably a few of them being crushed immediately. Well, I think everyone in construction has had this experience where they get told to use the Visa software, and then someone in the company or project's been promised this outcome.
00:10:52
Speaker
It doesn't exist at the moment, but we'll deliver it as a result of you buying it. And then that never works out well. It's infinitely, it's incredibly difficult to build good software. I remember those days.
Unexpected Incidents & Method Changes in Construction
00:11:07
Speaker
Right, last week, I think it was on Friday, a World War II bomb, a £500 bomb went off on a contractor's site. It went off? Yeah, you've got to check out this video. I thought I read that they found it. So this is... Holy shit. Yeah.
00:11:30
Speaker
That was a controlled explosion? It was the police investigating it and sent in robotics. But they didn't mean to actually set it off. That's accidental. Yeah, it went off. Holy. And so do we know how they found it? No. But it's a site where they're building, I believe, it's additional crossing over the Severn. And yeah, they obviously
00:11:58
Speaker
Discovered it luckily when they discovered it they didn't set off, but it's obviously yeah If the police couldn't disarm it without accidentally setting off I don't know how you possibly Dig next to it or on it or hit it or whatever and don't so some what happens then
00:12:14
Speaker
like HSE come in, shut down. Yeah, shut down police in. And then I think the police organize the controlled excavation around it to expose whatever they need to expose to disarm it. And by the looks of that that we just saw, it looked like they'd possibly taken some action to mitigate the risk of explosion by kind of like building
00:12:35
Speaker
Yeah, so hopefully the contractor just found it, located it on the police and it's not the contractors now sort of, they might not be in the wrong at all because it was the police that were actually in there when the bomb accident happened. Thankfully it wasn't, there shouldn't have been labour forces in the area and things like that.
00:12:53
Speaker
Some people were extremely lucky. Is that sensitive? Yeah, it's been there for 60, 80 years. Yeah, people walking and playing and whatever. That's one of the things that you get building in London, right?
00:13:08
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Has that happened on any of your previous projects? No, but I was on an HS2 scheme where they found a 60,000 body graveyard. 60,000? 60,000. I say found, I think they knew it was there, but I don't think they knew the extent of it because they were sort of on top of each other. But then they shut down the site for, it was years, and they hand dug out every body and moved it to a new grave.
00:13:34
Speaker
So to play a game, would you rather the bomb or the 60,000 body graveyard? The bomb you can carry on a week later. Assuming everyone's safe, of course. But no, I don't think a bomb would be a nice thing to discover on anyone's side. No, that's unreal.
00:13:54
Speaker
Right, so into a bit of a meatier one. We've got two major tunneling schemes. We've got the Sydney-Western Harbor Tunnel first. Do you want to talk a little bit about methodology change there?
00:14:06
Speaker
Yeah, so I think we saw in the news that the Western Harbour Tunnel contract was let recently and it was let to us, the owner. And surprisingly, I guess for some people, maybe not surprisingly, the approach was changed substantively to the contract award. So originally the scheme was designed to be a immersed tube or like submerged segment construction.
00:14:30
Speaker
I guess, similar to a project like for Marmbelt. Then, as the owner's submission, the proposal to change it to a board tunnel. And this is for traffic around.
00:14:42
Speaker
It's a road tunnel. The reason for the change was that there was a bunch of concerns relating to the original design with the immersed tube. The first bit is to do that construction methodology. You essentially have to dredge the seed bed, or in this case, the harbour bed, in order to prepare the surface. And dredging is terrible for the environment, biodiversity, and aquatic life. And then the other thing that they needed to do from memory was build
00:15:12
Speaker
I think quite large coffer dams at each side in order to I guess launch the segments pre-cast, I think they were possibly pre-casting some of them out there. There was like also disruption to the local community. The new method will take longer, I think, two, three years, something like that, longer. It's a TBM? Yeah, TBM. They have a special cutting head that is designed for, because it's kind of
00:15:39
Speaker
terrible soil. So the original design was a submerged segment because of how bad the conditions were. And so this is essentially going back to a method that like for people that don't know Sydney, there are currently a massive number of tunnel projects happening there across WestConnex, which is a road project, Sydney Metro, the rail project and the Metro West project that's starting now. So I guess board tunnels are probably a core competency for a lot of people that are in the industry there. So that's probably a positive.
00:16:09
Speaker
environmental positive but obviously adds a couple of, what I think is a couple of years to the completion date. What do you think about the Ferman belt and whether or not those risks and concerns that sort of push the change away from
00:16:24
Speaker
Yeah, so I wonder if it's slightly different because it's under sort of a sea and it's not a harbor in a congested city effectively. But they're doing what effectively was the original plant. They've got, I think there's seven to nine. So for those who don't know, like the Furman Belt project, you know more about it than me, but is it connecting Denmark to Germany?
Cross-border Connections: The Furman Belt Project
00:16:45
Speaker
Yeah, so it's Denmark to Germany.
00:16:47
Speaker
It is effectively, it's the method of syncing segments. It's 80, 220 meter long segments. And each segment is made up of two road tubes, two rail tubes, and an emergency tube for evacuations. And they're syncing these, they're all identical, so they can mass produce them, and then that'll connect the two sort of portals that they're building at the moment.
00:17:14
Speaker
How far away is Germany and Denmark? By memory, it's something like 10 to 20 kilometers, but it's 80 times 220 meters. Yeah, yeah. Whatever that comes out to. I've got a question to put you on the spot. Right. Do they sick the segments? Don't ask me how they build it.
00:17:30
Speaker
Do you reckon they're sealed at both ends and at the end they break through all the segments rather than sink them and then because that's a harder water to pull out. Couldn't sink them if they were sealed though because they'd be full of air. So they must. There we go, that's a good one. Do you reckon they seal at the end and then pump the water out? Must do. Because that's a serious... How do they line them up? That's the question. Especially in a sea which is going to have tides and everything else going. But I think that's quite deep. There must be something that guides on one that you land the other one into that guides it into position.
00:18:01
Speaker
Yeah, it could be like a jigsaw, right? It could have interlocking. The podcast will be speculate on construction method. Yeah, we'll have to get someone on who actually knows what they're talking about. But yeah, for that region, it's a massive time saving in terms of travel. Obviously, reduce CO2 from reducing the long way around, which is
00:18:20
Speaker
something like over 100 kilometers saved in terms of driving time and yeah a high-speed route that's going to be 200 miles an hour. You can drive or you can go across to... You can sort of go west and go all the way around. It's the Baltic Sea. So you go from Germany through the Netherlands. Yeah exactly and then up into Denmark. Right. So it cuts the normal requirement for someone to probably fly if not have a
00:18:49
Speaker
pretty long car journey. Wow. And so that project started when? They started four or five years ago. They started really cracking on with things like concrete and their main works about 12 to 18 months ago. You should probably just go to, like, as apex we work with them. Yeah, yeah, yes, we work with them. Yeah. Yeah. And they are really ramping up over the course of this year. And they are due to open, I believe, in 2029. And how many is a joint venture?
00:19:17
Speaker
Yeah, so there's a big, there's something called the Fairmount Link Contractors. It's a JV, or an alliance, which includes Demi Group, Vinci, Bashi, BAM, and one or two others. So, massive sort of joint effort. Rather than letting individual contracts, it's one huge contract, but then a larger sort of alliance, delivering it. What's the project language today?
00:19:40
Speaker
They speak impeccable English, better English than half the sites that we get. I speak Australian so it's fine. That's your own language. But no, they're really good. So the product's obviously in English, the support's in English, the training's in English, and they were great. So there's a German side.
00:20:00
Speaker
Yeah, so the Danish portal and the German portal. And it's all English, there's the German team. They should have it into project soccer matches, or is it football matches? They can probably put one in the teller.
00:20:15
Speaker
Right. After it's been de-watered. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it.
Episode Wrap-up & Future Insights
00:20:20
Speaker
So I have absolutely no idea how to wrap up a podcast, but today we've gone through bombs or bodies, how to sink tunnels, underwater football, and tech needed to remove busy work. Three, hopefully, pretty interesting topics there. Or two, depending on how many make the final cut. Yeah, I'm not sure our bomb discussion was in depth enough to call it a topic that maybe we could ever use up to date. You can't reference the segment that you can't.
00:20:44
Speaker
Then it gets put in. But I have no idea how to end the podcast, so thank you very much for listening. And yeah, we'll be chatting again soon. Thanks. Your first hosting session, Garth, was amazing. Well done. Thanks, mate.