Water Resources Consultant Queensland

SERVICES

How can we help you?

Water Resources assists its clients to meet their water needs by providing effective workable solutions that meet the technical, institutional, regulatory, economic, and environmental challenges facing their water supply. With Water Resources you have a partner who will provide professional, informed and practical advice based upon extensive experience in delivering and managing bulk water infrastructure. Water Resources can offer a tailored solution to meet your needs; whether you want to develop and own water supply infrastructure and water allocations or just want access to buy or lease water; we understand how.

We offer a complete range of water management services including strategic water planning, investigation studies, sourcing water entitlements, business cases, water infrastructure design, project development, project delivery support and dam safety services.

Strategic Water Planning

Strategic planning to meet water supply requirements involves the quantification of water supply needs and selecting the optimal mix of investment in both infrastructure and non-infrastructure initiatives to achieve targeted benefits and maximum economic returns. Water Resources has led strategic planning exercises for clients to ensure the right selection of supply initiatives to meet their requirements. Services offered by Water Resources in this regard include:

- Identification of strategic drivers and service need requirements
- Development of strategic assessment frameworks to enable ongoing development and assessment of water supply projects and non-infrastructure initiatives
- Facilitation of workshops to optimise strategy approaches and achieve buy-in from key stakeholders
- Development of specifications and engagement of technical services to support assessments
- Establishment and management of technical advisory panels
- Creation of public facing strategy documents to communicate strategy initiatives and achievement of objectives

Investigation Studies

Bulk water storages and water conveyance systems are built for the long term and require a significant investment to develop and operate effectively. Planning to deliver sustainable outcomes can be complex and a challenging balancing act, with many factors to be considered including the reliability of the water allocations, reliability of the asset, delivery timeframe, the capital and operations costs and associated risks. We partner with our clients to understand their unique challenges to deliver the optimum solution. Investigation studies are a critical part of water supply planning. Our capabilities include:

- feasibility studies
- water supply options studies
- concept development
- scheduling
- project cost estimating
- economic evaluations and water pricing

Sourcing Water Entitlements

Buying and selling water allocations on the temporary and permanent markets can be challenging, particularly in Queensland where markets are geographically isolated and lack the size and trading activity of southern markets where data is more freely available to inform trading strategies. Water Resources is intimately familiar with the Queensland water market and can assist clients with the identification, assessment and selection of the most appropriate water product. Our services include:

- Confirming availability of allocations
- Factors impacting seasonal trading prices
- Long term valuations of allocations
- Cost benefit trade offs between priority groups (high priority versus medium priority)
- Approaches to market
- Negotiation of contract terms including supply and distribution
- Discussions with Departmental staff and other stakeholders

Business Cases

Development of business cases for large scale water infrastructure is an essential part of ensuring the correct final investment decision and securing government funding. Water Resources has led the development of strategic assessments, options analyses, and detailed business cases for a range of major water infrastructure projects including new dam developments, dam raisings, weirs, and pipelines. Our business case services include:

- Business case planning, governance, and delivery
- Assessment of service needs and facilitation of Investment Logic Mapping
- Initiative development and options analysis
- Management of technical studies including economics, financial, social, environmental, and sustainability analysis
- Stakeholder engagement
- Ensuring compliance with Queensland Treasury’s Project Assessment Framework and DSDLGIP’s Business Case Development Framework
- Gateway review services (the Water Resources team are certified gateway reviewers)

Water Infrastructure Design

We prepare designs which are economical, efficient, safe, and meet statutory requirements. We provide consulting services covering new structures or upgrades to existing structures to increase performance, reliability and safety for both bulk water storages and water transmission and distribution systems. Our capabilities include:

Design of bulk water storages such as dams, weirs and offstream storages including:
- dam type comparison and selection
- spillway hydraulic analyses and design of terminal structures
- scour assessment
- stress and stability analyses
- flood routing
- freeboard analyses
- slope protection
- seismic design
- pore water pressure and seepage assessment
- filter design
- intake, conduit and outlet works design
- fish transfer system design
- refurbishments and upgrades of bulk water storages

Design of water conveyance systems such as pipelines and channels including:
- route selection
- hydraulic analyses
- pipe type comparison and selection
- trench design
- pipeline and pump station system optimisation
- pipeline and channel grading
- thrust block design
- air valve, scour outlet and control structure design
- waterhammer analyses
- augmentation of pipelines and channels

Project Development

Water Resources can improve certainty of outcome and reduce surprises during the delivery of a project by ensuring an appropriate delivery strategy, tender documentation and contracts are in place. Our experience enable us to help our clients identify, understand and manage risks while also identifying project opportunities. Our approach enables the development of a competitive procurement strategy which optimise risk allocation and value for money. Our project development services include:

- delivery strategies and procurement planning
- technical specifications
- special conditions of contract
- technical advice
- value engineering
- risk and opportunity assessment
- risk adjusted capital cost and whole of life cost estimation
- budget establishment and contingency allocation
- project planning, scheduling and controls

Project Delivery Support

Water Resources provides a wealth of delivery experience and understands the enormous challenges water projects can face. We provide considered advice to support client decision making. Our staff are former project leaders and possess extensive experience leading the delivery of complex water infrastructure projects. Our project delivery support services include:

- project governance and reporting
- independent project progress reviews
- due diligence reviews
- project management
- client representative services
- contract administration and superintendent services
- technical review panel services
- owners engineer services

Dam Safety

Dams provide valuable benefits to their owners and the wider community. However, dams need to be safe. Dam failure can release water in an uncontrolled manner that can result in loss of life, damage to property and environmental harm. Water Resources provides support to dam owners in establishing the safety status of their dams and, if necessary, bringing them to an acceptable level of safety. Our dam safety services include:

- monitoring and surveillance evaluation
- engineering inspections
- dam safety reviews
- comprehensive risk assessments
- safety assessments
- design of dam safety upgrades
- upgrade project plan reports
- certification of dam safety works

The Water Resources team come from a service delivery background having worked in water utilities for a combined period of over 40 years prior to consulting. This owners perspective enables us to provide effective water supply solutions drawn from experience for the benefit of our clients.

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