Why Anglian’s 500km resilience solution is ‘so much more than a pipe’

Anglian Water broke ground last month on one of the largest infrastructure projects the water sector has ever seen, which seeks to connect the east of England north to south to transport water. More than 500km of pipe will move supplies from areas of surplus to some of the driest parts of the region to improve resilience in the face of a changing climate, population pressures and ever tightening abstraction licences. Anglian's chief executive, Peter Simpson, speaks to Utility Week about the landmark project.

“It’s much, much more than just a pipe, it’s a complete system change for how we as Anglian think about and operate the business,” Simpson says of the undertaking.

The pipeline was conceived to balance out supply and demand by moving away from serving communities out of single water sources

The company is facing an 85 megalitres a day reduction to its abstraction licences over the next couple of years to protect aquifers, particularly chalk ones.

Added to this pressure is the estimated 175,000 due to be built across the region during AMP7 and the impacts of climate change. If the company took no action these combined pressures would see the area’s water resources shift from a surplus of around 150 megalitres per day at the beginning of this investment period, to a deficit of 30 megalitres per day by 2025.

“In light of those challenges, by 2045 the deficit would be 144 megalitres a day,” Simpson says. “So, it brings it into sharp focus, in only a relatively short period we would move from surplus to deficit.”

The strategy to meet these needs includes an emphasis on demand management through leakage reduction and more smart metering in the near term while the pipeline in under construction.

“Part of the trick we’re trying to pull off with the pipeline is to enable us to balance things out. The benefit it gives us as well as moving around to balance supply and demand, but also gives resilience,” Simpson explains.

The project will knit together the system of individual water treatment works serving separate communities to give as many customers as possible at least two sources of supply. This means managing multiple systems together while avoiding water quality issues from combining water sources.

“The more you get into it, the more you realise how far away from just laying a pipe it really is,” Simpson points out. He describes it instead as an intelligent smart water system with sensors and monitors feeding data into a digital twin. Integrating existing systems is the complicated part to bring together legacy assets and systems that run on different platforms together in a cyber secure way.

“There’s a huge opportunity here to build a system with digital capabilities,” he explains. “At the heart of this is to come up with a new way of building, operating and maintaining – the digital twin is integral to that.”

Anglian formed the Strategic Pipeline Alliance (SPA) between engineering and construction firms Costain, Farrans, Jacobs and Mott MacDonald Bentley to complete the infrastructure project.

SPA director, James Crompton, says: “Laying the pipe is the big, exciting engineering part, but that’s sort of the easy bit. The book ends at the beginning and end are the really challenging pieces.”

He adds: “This will be more like the transmission system that National Grid would have to more power around a bigger network.” The Alliance team has taken learnings from Crossrail in terms of the complexity of engineering involved and is developing the digital twin in parallel to laying pipes.

Spanning multiple separate areas on this scale, the system operation and water quality challenges become more complex.

Larger populated centres like Milton Keynes and Northampton already have combined systems that need to become more integrated. It means managers sat on the Humber Bank now need a picture of the water needs in Colchester.

“They are going to have a much wider responsibility and need to have a digital twin to model different scenarios across multiple supply areas,” Simpson says. “It’s going to mean we need a different organisation approach.”

SPA will use the digital twin to rehearse how the system will operate, through commissioning, to have the best chance of getting it right first time. Crompton explains time constraints of completing the project within a single AMP have forced the teams to explore innovative ways of working.

“From day one we have worked to the mantra of ‘deliberately delivering differently’. Doing this in one single AMP we literally have to do things differently, otherwise we would run out of money, time, carbon – or all three. That’s where the digital technology, learning from construction industries comes in.”

He outlines the innovative techniques and methods utilised in the scheme including welding trials to overcome quality issues; ploughing into fields to lay the pipe directly into the ground, which disturbs the land less and closes up the ground.

“The time and cost savings here were huge,” Crompton points out, adding that the alliance partners were key to finding these novel ways of working and carrying out digital trials first to allow for unhindered production.

The team are considering how to commission the pipeline without flushing the system as is traditionally done for quality and hygiene reasons, but at this scale would require huge amounts of water.

“It seems at odds to waste water to test the system with water taken from the environment when we are trying to conserve it. That forced us to look at waterless commissioning,” Crompton says.

“We have considered what it will look like to not use water for commissioning, at the welding trials we have had to step up our game to create and maintain factory quality environment. If we can keep everything sterile then we can potentially do less at the end. This will have a big effect on time, money, carbon and sustainability of the programme.”

Since 2009, all of Anglian’s capital projects have been assessed for carbon, leading to a 61 per cent reduction across all projects from that baseline. The company is now on a journey to get to 65 per cent reduction by the end of this AMP and 70 per cent reduction by 2030.

“Every scheme has its own capital carbon target, it’s important to not only look at operational emissions but make sure we aren’t building things in the same way and incurring carbon as a by-product,” Simpson said.

Driving out the carbon as well as cost efficiencies means traditional approaches have been challenged to hit the targets.

Crompton says: “There’s always more than one way to achieve an outcome so we looked at different materials, techniques, innovative technologies and working with the supply chain. Suppliers start to leap-frog one another to offer lower carbon alternatives to cement and mixers. It really drives the supply chain agenda.”

Driving down carbon has simultaneously reduced costs through efficient and simpler approaches, Crompton explains. Producers and manufacturers challenged each step in the processes to make carbon savings, which translated to lower costs.

Simpson, who is one of the sector leads on the Public Interest Commitment to reach net zero carbon by 2030, says: “We track carbon as a company very closely. The digital twin opportunities to look at how systems can work optimally. The twin allows us to run scenarios that would not only offer the best quality but also the lowest environmental impact in terms of carbon.”