Alliance Contracting - Design-Build for Water and Wastewater Projects - page 330

project costs. To address the aggressive project schedule, a number of fast-tracking tactics
were employed by the alliance. The alliance contractual arrangement enabled the alliance
to order long lead-time items that were on the critical path, and to airship equipment
packages from overseas suppliers to meet commercial schedules before the target cost
estimate was signed into agreement. To meet the tight project schedule, the engineering
for the project was performed by several teams located in Australia (coordination point),
India, United States, and Singapore.
The Bundamba AWTP uses membrane and advanced oxidation technologies to pro-
duce purified recycled water for cooling and other purposes for a power station. The
project's performance criteria included production capacity/recovery rate, availability, and
operating costs (e.g., energy use and chemical costs). It was essential to the owner that the
facilities produce water of the specified quality and quantity, as quickly as possible.
Alliance contracting made the ambitious goals during its design, construction, and
commissioning stages possible. Eleven months after groundbreaking, the plant produced
purified recycled water. The Queensland Government and the alliance team also con-
ducted extensive community consultation via press conferences throughout the project.
Melbourne's Eastern Treatment Plant
A progressive alliance framework was used for the advanced tertiary upgrade for the Mel-
bourne Water Corporation (MWC). The Eastern Treatment Plant (ETP) is one of the larg-
est wastewater facilities in Australia, treating almost half of Melbourne's wastewater (i.e.,
98 mgd, or 371 ML/d, average and 187 mgd, or 708 ML/d, peak flow) to secondary quality.
Secondary effluent is discharged to the Bass Strait in the South Ocean where high color,
litter, and toxicity to the marine environment have occurred. The goals of the project were
primarily to improve the marine environment by the end of 2012. Changes in technol-
ogy, a sustained 10-year drought, and other circumstances put this project on a fast-track
schedule to meet the 2012 deadline (Gilevitis et al. 2010). In this progressive alliance, the
engineer was engaged first to initiate and expedite trials testing and begin preliminary
design development. The alliance contractor was selected later, which allowed more time
for planning the overall alliance structure.
Establishing an alliance framework for the ETP project was attractive to MWC
because it created a collaborative team with appropriate risk and reward sharing early in
the project when key risks could not be defined or allocated. The intent was to eliminate
adversarial relationships that occur in traditional or DB projects where uncertain risks are
allocated to one party or the other. For MWC, the Advanced Tertiary Upgrade Project at
the ETP presented the challenges of a shorter-than-anticipated project delivery schedule
with certain process approvals and validation risks that could not be clearly defined. The
alliance agreement enabled MWC to proceed with the project in a progressive manner to
meet the regulatory-driven schedule, to allow more owner input and control, to have risk
managed by all parties, and to achieve the desired delivery results. The project framework
also allowed the alliance team to balance economic, environmental, and social project
goals to create a sustainable solution.
As with most alliances, the MWC alliance is different from the typical owner-
contractor-engineer contract models where one entity is contracted to another. For MWC,
the alliance is viewed as a project delivery organization—a company or corporation that