Over the past two decades the European tunnelling market has strengthened and expanded, both in the number of projects and technical capabilities.
Although activity in southern Europe has slowed as a result of the recent global economic recession and the Eurozone uncertainty, projects in northern Europe are forging ahead. In fact, according to BTS chairman and Balfour Beatty tunnelling manager Roger Bridge, it’s probably the best it’s ever been, in the UK at least.
Ian Gee, director, ground engineering at Atkins, agrees. "These are upbeat and exciting times. We’re very excited about what’s happening and what’s on the drawing board," he says.
Jordi Ferrando Cuadradas, FCC Construction’s managing director for Europe, is equally positive.
"Infrastructure investment in Europe may still be down on pre-crisis levels but there are a number of high-profile tunnelling projects planned, under way and recently completed that give good reason to be optimistic," he says.
One of the main drivers for tunnelling activity is transport. Czech Tunnelling Association chairman Ivan Hrdina says that road and rail projects in the EU-15 this year had an estimated value of USD 1.43 trillion. Of that, tunnels and bridges accounted for USD 226bn, and trams and metros USD 95.6bn.
These transport projects are motivated by a need to mitigate the environmental and economic implications of traffic congestion, and the EU’s ambition to improve transport connections across the continent.
"With increasing connectivity high up on the EU agenda, tunnelling is playing a big role," says Ferrando.
Some of the projects already under way include the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland, which will be the world’s longest and deepest traffic tunnel when it opens next year, and the Brenner Base Tunnel, the world’s second longest tunnel running 55km from Austria to Italy, is scheduled for completion in 2026. Both tunnels are part of the European Commission’s Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T).
Aimed at helping to transform the way goods and people move within the EU, the TEN-T will involve the construction of around 2,100km of tunnels in Europe by 2030. The ambitious 19km submerged Fehmarn Tunnel, connecting Denmark and Germany under the Baltic Sea, is also part of the network.
Forging links
Cowi’s Chief Specialist Søren Degn Eskesen, who is also the current ITA president, points out that the EU is also prioritising cross-border projects that are part of the United Nations’ E20 route which aims to establish transport connections across Europe.
However, he added that challenges of working across borders remain.
"Standards have to be matched. If you’re building a railway line you may have different electrical systems so you have to switch from one to another," he says. "There are also different approval processes and environmental requirements. The whole planning and approval process takes longer because you have two national bodies involved."
In addition to the construction of new tunnels, there are many projects upgrading existing road tunnels, especially in the alpine regions of Austria, Switzerland and northern Italy. "More than 1,000km of tunnels will have been built for that purpose by 2020," says Eskesen.
To address congestion in some of Europe’s large cities, several metro projects are under way.
These include the Grand Paris Express, Copenhagen’s Metro City circle line, and the city railway line in Stockholm. The Grand Paris Express is an ambitious project to provide France’s capital city with more than 205km of new rail network.
The scheme, which combines two projects planned earlier, comprises four new lines and the extension of two existing lines. It will be built in six phases scheduled for commissioning between 2020 and 2030.
Copenhagen’s new circle line is a 15.5km twin tunnel route that will, as the name suggests, add a circular transport route around the city, connecting with the existing M1 and M2 metro lines at Frederiksberg and Kongens Nytorv stations. The new system, which is due to open in 2018, will have 17 new stations.
In Sweden, the USD 2.4bn Stockholm City Line, or Citybanan, comprises a 6km-long double rail track, a parallel tunnel and two underground stations.
The line, which is scheduled to open in 2017, is the largest investment in Stockholm’s rail system since 1950. In recent years much of Norway’s tunnelling work has concentrated on hydro power projects but it is now changing the focus to transport.
"Norway is sitting on a fairly good cash account so it’s going to start spending. They want to invest in non-oil and gas infrastructure in a way they haven’t done in the past," says Gee. "It’s a little bit more prosaic in that it was affected by the downturn but it has particular problems and development objectives which it’s trying to resolve with extensions to various schemes such as light rail, metro, have rail, ERTMS and signalling on the heavy rail network."
In March, the joint venture of Acciona Infraestructuras and Ghella was awarded the main tunnel contract for the Follo line, Norway’s largest railway contract to date. The 20km, twin tunnel, linking Oslo and Ski, to the south of the capital, is currently the largest infrastructure project in Norway and will be the longest rail tunnel in the Nordic countries. The order for four TBMs has been placed with Herrenknecht and boring will start at the end of next year, following the initial drill and blast phase.
Norway also has long-held plans to develop transport connections along the length of the west coast which involves 1,500km of road and, according to Eskesen, "plenty of tunnels and fjord crossings".
In various European countries tunnels are also being built for flood control and water stores to deal with the higher rainfall expected as a result of climate change.
"This will generate more projects in the future," says Eskesen, citing 100 small projects planned in Copenhagen alone.
In the UK there is a "slight lull" in terms of site work, says Bridge, as the TBMs have finished on Crossrail and the Bond Street upgrade is coming to an end but there are plenty of projects due to start soon, or in the advanced planning stages.
"We’re probably facing the busiest workload we’ve had for a long time," he says.
UK projects include Shieldhall, Scottish Water’s £100m, 3.1 mile-long waste water tunnel in the south of Glasgow, part of the biggest upgrade of the city’s waste water network in more than a century; London’s major new sewer, Thames Tideway; High-Speed 2; Crossrail 2; London Underground station upgrades; the Northern Line extension to Battersea; the proposed southern extension to the Bakerloo Line; and the lower Thames crossing at Silvertown.
In northern England, the York Potash mine has been granted approval. It will be the first potash mine to be built in the UK for 40 years and will include a 37.5km mineral transport tunnel to carry the polyhalite from the mine near Whitby to the handling facility at Teesside. The long-talked about tunnel under Stonehenge is also being discussed again.
In addition, there is what Bridge calls "the backbone" of smaller projects that are often overlooked.
"People talk about the big schemes but going on day to day are the utility, below the radar projects. They’re the backbone that keep things ticking over," he says.
Heading south
While the tunnels market is buoyant in northern Europe and the UK, the global financial crisis and uncertainty in the Eurozone have taken their toll in some countries and, as a consequence, on some projects. Eskesen says the Lyon ring road project would have made better progress if it were not for the financial crisis. The road, designed to reduce congestion on the two highways that run through the centre of France’s third largest city, has never been completed on the western side.
Projects in countries such as Spain and Ireland, which in the past benefited from large sums of EU funding, have also fallen victim to the financial downturn. In Dublin, the two-line metro and the EUR 4bn (USD 4.3bn) DART underground – the latter involving 7.6km of twin tunnels – have been put on ice and Gee doubts they will be realised in the next five to 10 years.
"There was a great enthusiasm for those capital projects in the heydey of European investment in that country but that’s stopped. The Irish economy is starting to turn around and there are a couple of tunnelling schemes coming up in water supply and waste water in Dublin but the really major tunnelling projects are mired at the moment," he says.
As some markets have slowed, especially in southern Europe, more companies are now looking for work in northern Europe, especially in the busy Scandinavian region. The result is a more competitive market.
"Norway has invited them to come because they have so many projects and they want to have a competitive tendering process," says Eskesen. Many Italian and Spanish contractors are entering the market and Copenhagen’s Circle Line is being built by "mainly Italian contractors", he added.
Labour gap
All this work in Europe going on at the same time as there are large projects in the Middle East and across the globe raises the question of whether the industry has the labour resources and expertise available to match the demand.
"The issue is engineering resources and the mobility of people to deliver these projects," says Gee.
"Some clients in the UK who traditionally think it’s someone else’s problem are starting to think about engineering resources and the amount of work being programmed. It’s giving some concerns for capacity although contractors will invariably say ‘it’s not a problem; we will deliver it’. Yes, it might be delivered, but I think an acute demand for skills will develop between 2016-2017, particularly in the UK."
Roger Bridge also acknowledges the potential pressure on labour and skills but says historically the industry has managed the peaks and troughs of work. With commodities markets declining mining engineers would be available for work, and contractors and clients would also need to work together "on reasonable expectations for competency".
"It would be very easy for a client to be quite demanding on the competencies of the workforce and find it very difficult to achieve," says Bridge. "On some jobs all sprayers have to be EFNARC accredited. That takes three years so if you bring in trainees they can’t spray shotcrete on that project. It’s balances like that that have to be achieved and considered in a reasonable manner."
The long bidding and development process for these major projects slows down the tunnelling sector, says Ferrando, although it is not surprising, given the scale of investment required – and there are rewards.
"On the back of Crossrail, projects like HS2 and Thames Tideway will require huge amounts of expertise to deliver and they represent a healthy pipeline for the UK market." Many of the projects in the starting blocks will push new boundaries and tackling these is helped by industry collaboration and lessons learned from previous jobs.
"Collaboration has almost become the norm. Projects are now larger and there’s an expectation that most projects of GBP 100m-plus will be delivered by a joint venture," says Gee.
"In terms of developing the state-of-the-art there are specifics in terms of technology but a lot of it comes from a body of knowledge and experience vested in individual companies. You only have to look at the people queuing up for the large amount of work in the UK – it’s everyone under the sun."
In learning from past projects, Eskesen believes the industry has not only honed its technical abilities but it is also better at managing risks.
The ITA has several committees working on technical guidelines in order to have new ideas accepted by the market more quickly and Eskesen expects technical advances to continue.
"We are now building tunnels that we wouldn’t have been able to years ago," says Eskesen. "Nearly every year we see a new record in terms of diameter or links or depths of tunnelling projects, and I think it will continue."
He says the Fehmarn Tunnel will "definitely break a new record and be technically challenging".
Gee identifies the Follo line as a potential game-changer for tunnelling in northern Europe.
"It’s introducing hard rock TBM technology to a market that’s more familiar with drill and blast," he says.
"I think the client decided he wants an international standard railway with a segmentally lined bored running tunnel.
It’s ruffled a few feathers in the market by choosing that as opposed to what is northern European custom and practice of unlined hard rock tunnels."
The demands of working at high pressure will also drive innovation, says Gee. "Thames Tideway has attracted the sort of contractors who can work at unusually high pressures of ground water, in deep tunnels in pretty demanding circumstances. I think there will be a lot more of that," he says. "I think the potential demands of working in excess of 3-4 bars pressure will continue to drive innovation."
Every project has its challenges and "if they were easy they would have been done before", says Bridge, and the next phase of UK tunnels will be no exception. "Work in and under London is always challenging with the structures you have to interact with and the ever-growing use of the underground space. It will be an interesting challenge if there’s an overlap in projects – the Northern Line extension, Thames Tideway, Silvertown. If they’re all trying to use river resources then the logistical support of those schemes will create a challenge," he says.
Outside London HS2 will also present logistics issues with the length of some of the tunnels and the challenges of working on rural sites. While none of them will be an easy project, says Bridge, they will receive their "fair and due attention and the problems will be overcome" and they are indicative of the healthy appetite for infrastructure and tunnelling. "It’s a good time to be a tunneller," he says
