CARBON PUSH FOR MAJOR PROJECTS
AN alliance of some of Australia’s largest engineering and construction groups is backing a proposal that would require major infrastructure projects to consider potential carbon emissions, not just price.
Development heavyweight Lendlease, engineering giant ACCIONA, and global toll road operator Transurban are among the names supporting the proposal from Infrastructure Partnerships Australia, which is pushing for governments to write in a carbon emissions requirement for all big projects.
The proposal would see bidders for projects in excess of $100m in works not only required to bid on how cheaply they could deliver the job, but what the total emissions intensity would be.
Infrastructure Partnerships Australia chief executive Adrian Dwyer said Australia had a chance to bake a carbon requirement into all future projects, both on a state and federal level.
“You should do this right from the very inception, by the time it gets to a contractor, whose focus is making a dollar on thin margins, all the big opportunities to reduce the carbon are gone,” he said.
“The mechanism we want is if you as a government want to solve a problem, a transport link, you’d understand the embedded carbon implication of all those options.”
ACCIONA Australia CEO Bede Noonan said there was an enormous opportunity to reduce carbon emissions if governments introduced a baseline requirement.
“We get structures in Australia which are significantly more conservative than what’s built in Europe,” he said.
Transurban made efforts to slash emissions on the recent WestConnex M4-M5 link project in Sydney, replacing 32 per cent of cement with fly ash, a waste material from power plants.
Transurban delivery and risk group executive Hugh Wehby said the adoption of emissions standards on its recent projects had seen it collectively reduce embodied emissions by more than 644,000 tonnes of carbon.
“We require Infrastructure Sustainability ratings to be achieved on each of our major projects,” he said.