Unimaginable scale in every way is everyone’s first thought of China. And the shrill hysteria of financial reporters when growth in the People’s Republic drops below double digits is testament to this. Besides the usual figures of 1.3bn people and foreign exchange reserves in the trillions, tunnelling is of a scale that the West has never seen, and probably will never see. There is not space in this special report to devote a paragraph to all the major projects underway. In urban transportation alone some 50 cities in China are developing metro projects.
“The metros of China form the backbone of public transport,” says Mott MacDonald’s managing director of China Paul Jenkins. “There is a limited supply of cars permitted, which puts pressure on the metros – and quite rightly. In Beijing, for example, there is a lottery on who gets a car. The significance of this for tunnelling is that lines that opened two years ago in Beijing are already at capacity.”
Jenkins has spent 26 years working in the Asia Pacific region. He says, “The tunnelling industry has expanded hugely over the last few decades, and in China it has been even more explosive. This is both in the number and diversity of projects, because you have to remember that in China you are starting from a very low base of infrastructure in many places, and so there is a correspondingly greater improvement to be made in towns and cities.”
Recent years have seen a more intense effort by western companies to work in China, further driven by the economic turmoil in Europe and the US, but there has long been foreign involvement in the area.
Jenkins says, “Mott MacDonald has been around on mainland China for 35 years now and in Hong Kong for 50 years. It started in the early days on environmental projects, including the Shanghai clean up schemes. It’s fair to say that Shanghai and other cities were in a pretty bad way at this time, but major improvements have clearly been made over the past few decades.
“We are actually just about finishing the Shanghai environment and wastewater projects now, after 30 years of working on the various jobs to deal with sewage and flooding,” adds Jenkins.
“Besides the metros come our major projects at the moment, the high speed Passenger Dedicated Lines (PDLs). This for us relates to around 300km of tunnels, for which we perform the role of the Jiangli. This is basically a construction supervisor role, a legal requirement for all construction projects in China, but on PDLs the Jiangli must be linked to a foreign consultant. In effect, the most senior person controlling the work of a local Jiangli must be an expat.”
Jenkins says, “A single Jiangli will look after a 30-60km section. Around 70 per cent of the sections we’ve got are through tunnels, which looks to be a reliable indicator for the whole. So, of 10,000km of PDL, you are looking at 7,000km of tunnelled works. And these lines are absolutely all over, we have some portals that are 3,000m above sea level and take all day just to get to – it’s unbelievable.”
Jenkins says that the routes between the main cities are all in now, the next batch to come are the strategic ones such as airports, which are unable to deal with the incredible amount of business travel that flows through them. To counter this they will be linked to the rail networks.
Growing pains
Red zone
Gary Ge, associate and leader of Arup’s China infrastructure team, says, “Large state-owned companies still dominate the market in China, and it is unlikely for international firms to win the entire or major design packages. These are also our most regular JV partners [rather than European colleagues].”
Jenkins explains, “We cannot perform detailed design work as things stand in China. To win this sort of work, you need a Grade A Design Licence. These are not awarded to foreign entities and the majority are held by a vast number of enormous Chinese ‘Design Institutes’ (DIs). We can still perform management, quantity surveying, feasibility work and construction supervision of course.
“We also had a problem five or six years ago on the Chengdo to Xi’an line. It was suddenly decided that all foreign input was to be stopped and we were booted off the project. Two or three lean years for us followed – so you see, it is not always ‘up and up’ in China – and then about 18 months ago we started picking up these PDL jobs and revenues are expanding.”
Starting from scratch
China has come a long way in a few short decades from a ‘very low base of infrastructure’. This has brought challenges, and also opportunity for tunnellers plying their trade in the country.
“Much of what you might call the ‘easier tunnelling’ has now been taken as far as it can,” says Jenkins. “The cut and cover parts of the Beijing metro and so on. Now China has to get into more difficult kinds of tunnelling, passing close to and underneath existing tunnels and interchange structures. There are some problems emerging too, similar to London in some ways in the use of underground space. It is something that Hong Kong has taken to a fine art, planning underground space use and lessons need to be learned by the mainland.
“It wasn’t carelessness or a lack of skill, it was just a lack of knowledge of how metro systems develop over time. This brings us back to the design licences. The Chinese DIs operate mainly according to guidelines. This is not just in the form of separate Chinese Standards.
“If you take railway tunnelling, for example, all works are undertaken according to the Ministry of Railway’s design guidelines. The DI will assess a project’s requirements, the geology and so on and then come up with a solution based on guideline manuals, for example coming to the conclusion that: ‘this project requires a tunnel of type 3B’. There is less finite analysis, less geotechnical investigation, and these guidelines are set in stone. This has worked until now.”
Jenkins adds, “With more challenging tunnelling emerging, more analysis is required, this cannot be avoided. A more open market is needed, and China will have to change over the next 10 years to bring it more in line with the rest of the world, with DIs operating more like traditional consultants. Mott MacDonald and others are waiting for that day and we are in discussion with the DIs over collaboration. This is essential, as licence laws cannot change over night.
“There are also not many private DIs to buy and there is always the risk that if you do acquire one, they lose their licence and then you are stuck with a lot of designers unable to design.”
Chasing the dragon
Benefits of strong leadership
A more positive side of working in China is the surety that if the government begins a project, nothing can halt it. Jenkins tells T&TI that it is exciting to be an engineer in Beijing. Projects shoot through the early phases and, even at construction, progress is faster than is often dreamed of in the West. And this is not just some government-led push into tunnelling. Chinese leadership is responding to an overarching need for these projects in the face of an ever growing, and ever demanding population.
The north-south water supply projects are an example of this. There is very little water in the north and west of China compared to the south and east (see satellite image, opposite). The government has been investing in an astonishing array of canals, tunnels and aqueducts, stretching for thousands of kilometres.
Expanding away from China
An emerging trend to seek work abroad is emerging in Chinese companies. This is not unheard of even in multinationals based in China, stretching back out into the global market in JV with China-based enterprises. Jenkins of Mott and Ge of Arup have both experienced this.
“We are always trying to get into new markets,” says Jenkins. “Going overseas with Chinese contractors is something we are looking at. We act as designers on Chinese-funded interests. Despite the domestic focus of the latest Five Year Plan, this is a large market that we’ve identified.”
Ge gives the other side of the trend: “By 2010 around 87 per cent of the 85,000km State 7-9-18 Network had been completed and was in operation. In the Chinese 12th Five-Year Plan, high speed rail and urban rail are the priorities of development.”
However, the construction plans of high speed rail are under review by the government after the Wenzhou high-speed train crash on 23 July 2011.
Ge adds, “Because of this situation, some state-owned enterprises are making adjustments to their development strategies, i.e., intending to explore more overseas opportunities. This is of strong interest right now. For example: in conjunction with the China Communications Construction Company, Arup is carrying out the feasibility study and preliminary design for the multi-lane road tunnel under the Karnaphuli River in Chittagong, Bangladesh. The tunnel is the first river-crossing tunnel in Bangladesh.”
On the horizon
As T&TI goes to press the estimate is that 5,940km of high-speed rail tunnelling is underway in China. This looks set to continue. Other tunnelling works just around the corner include a series of road tunnel connections between the six ring roads of Beijing to deal with the increasing congestion there.
Feasibility studies are underway, with construction possibly starting in 2012. Chongqing and Shanghai are also looking into this sort of project.
Flood relief for the south will also become a prominent interest of the government. AECOM is working on a Shanghai water transfer tunnel and Mott MacDonald is lobbying for combined tunnel solutions similar to the stormwater management and road tunnel (SMART) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
On the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge-Tunnel, dredging has begun as well as the manufacture of casting basins for the immersed tube units.
Final word
T&TI presents a report on metro tunneling under the fragile buildings of Xi’an’s ancient city; the trying ground conditions on the Pinglu tunnel of the Yellow River Diversion Project (water supply); and Zhengzhou provides a case study for the metro construction underway in a huge number of Chinese cities trying to cope with the population boom.
Zhengzhou Metro Line One A satellite image clearly showing the water divide between the north west and south east regions of China, which is driving the need for water transfer tunnels The first of two Robbins EPBMs was launched on Lot 12 of the Xi’an metro in June 2010, and is now currently on its last section of tunnel
