Construction, operation and maintenance of a treatment infrastructure

When you build a new treatment infrastructure (greenfield project), your basic challenges are that:

• Schedule is delayed
• Budget is exceeded
• What is built is not exactly what had been designed
• What is built or what has been designed is not optimized from operation & maintenance perspective.

In the specific case where you retrofit/rehabilitate/expand an existing treatment infrastructure (brownfield project), your additional basic challenges are:

The co-activity and therefore required coordination between the existing treatment plant which needs to keep operating & performing its purpose, and the construction of the retrofit, rehabilitation and/or expansion

Beyond your basic challenges around construction, your ultimate challenge is to ensure that your asset is sustainable over time, i.e. its cost is optimized over its full lifecycle, not just the construction cost:

• Construction cost is the “visible”, smallest part of lifecycle cost
• Operation & maintenance costs over the 20, 25 or 30+ years (possibly also including disposal), the “less visible”, largest part

Besides, when you procure a new treatment infrastructure with a high content of innovation, you may find it too risky that it does not perform and/or that your own staff will not be experienced enough to operate and maintain it properly.

This solution allows to deliver a treatment plant that shall meet specific performance standards (treatment quality, energy efficiency, environmental footprint, …), within agreed-upon & firm budget and schedule.

We have:

• Decades of experience in design & construction of water and waste treatment facilities
• Internal resources for the key required disciplines (process, engineering, procurement, project management, etc.)
• Mindset of a technology integrator, integrating the technology that best fit the client’s needs, leveraging
  - Proprietary technologies, primarily in water treatment, as well as
  - External/partnership technologies, when relevant
  

This solution:

• Provides you with assurance that the treatment asset will operate as promised at design stage; i.e., in terms of
  - Performance: plant meets the required performance standards
  - Capacity: plant runs at its full design capacity
  - Budget: operation & maintenance costs are optimized, within budget committed at design stage
  - Lifetime: plant is maintained with objective to last as long as feasible
  
  
• Enable you to safely adopt latest innovation
  - You can access the most innovative, leading edge technology at no risk, since performance is committed by us
  - Operation & Maintenance period included in the Design, Build & Operate enables to develop the capabilities of the local workforce for operating & managing the new asset, with progressive know-how transfer
  
  
• Allows you to bring in the design of your new asset our return on experience (REX) from operation & maintenance of existing similar assets
  - Our designers will take into account the expertise & experience of our plant managers who consolidate the REX from operating & maintaining many similar treatment facilities

We have numerous references of water and waste treatment facilities delivered under design, construction & operation contracts in many countries in the world.

Contractually, how does it work to combine Design/Build & Operation/Maintenance?

Practically, you sign a unique contract with us to cover both the Design/Build phase and the Operation & Maintenance phase:

• You can hold us as the single party responsible for construction and operation phases,
• The longer DBO duration you decide, the longer we commit on Operation & Maintenance costs, which provides you with stability in budget planning
• Typical duration being from 5 to 15 years.