Stranded Assets

Another key issue to look at is what the location will be like at the end of the project or the end-of-life of the facility to ensure that the project will still be viable in the future. Facilities that are no longer economically viable due to changing climate, access to natural resource, or social changes are considered stranded assets. Some examples include:

• Operations in semi-arid regions that run out of water for production as rainfall patterns change
• Coastal facilities that could flood with rising sea level and larger storm events
• Infrastructure designed for old weather patterns that are no longer economical as storm events become more severe, more frequent, and disrupt operations
• Cold climate resource projects that have limited access because winter roads no longer freeze

When evaluating locations for project facilities and supporting infrastructure, project teams need to assess how a changing climate may impact the project in the future and include these potential changes in the location selection to minimize the risk that these assets will become stranded and devalued in the future.

Integrated Infrastructure

Selecting locations and development strategies for project infrastructure must also consider how the project infrastructure fits with the existing infrastructure used by the local community, or with infrastructure that could be developed to improve conditions within the local community. Infrastructure that would support local development includes water and waste water treatment, electrical power, roads, waste management facilities, and communications (especially internet access). This is especially true for many natural resource projects that are being developed at remote locations where the infrastructure for the facility needs to be developed and maintained to support the operations.

The project's infrastructure strategy can have a large impact on the surrounding environment and local communities, which presents both risks and opportunities for the project. The infrastructure strategy can range from an isolationist approach (the project infrastructure is not connected to the local community) to a fully integrated approach. A range of infrastructure strategies is outlined in Table 10.1.

When evaluating supporting infrastructure options, assess the use of partnerships with the local community and the local government to manage shared infrastructure. As discussed in Chapter 2, this could be managed through the use of public-private partnerships (P3s) or people-public-private partnerships (P4s) for all of the parties to share in the investment for the infrastructure (roads, power, or water) and then recover the investment from user fees or tolls.

Using a shared infrastructure strategy can also have a benefit for closure planning. Shared infrastructure can be sold or deeded to local governments or communities at the end of the project life, which can decrease closure bonding or asset retirement obligations (see Chapter 14).

Resettlement/Land Acquisition

In some cases, a major project will require the acquisition of land or buildings and the resettlement of people to construct the main facility or supporting infrastructure. This can happen where a community is located above a natural resource or where linear infrastructure needs to pass through a community. The legal complexity of resettlement and land acquisition makes it difficult to discuss in general terms, as each country and region will have its own laws and customs. But project teams should keep in mind several key things to support the overall sustainability of the project:

• Minimizing the amount of land required by minimizing the project footprint and carefully selecting infrastructure routes can help to reduce the impact of the project.
• Negotiating land acquisition with the government is legally required, but even more important is open and transparent discussions with the local community on land acquisition and resettlement process.
• Discussions with the community and the impacted individuals should include one-on-one and group workshops to make the resettlement process as positive as possible.
• Evaluate ways to support the people being resettled, which could include preferred employment or small business contracts.

Greenfield versus Brownfield Locations

Another option that should be considered for the location of a project is whether to construct on a greenfield site or a brownfield site. Greenfield sites are locations where there has been no development and the environment is undisturbed. Brownfield sites are locations that have been developed and the environment has experienced some level of environmental damage.

Developing a new project on a greenfield site has a lot of advantages as there are no legacy issues that must be managed, and the local community is less likely to have preexisting negative attitudes toward the project. The downside is that the project will damage natural land or land that is used for agriculture.

Developing on brownfield sites is often avoided because a new project generally does not seek to manage cleanups, such as old spills and broken infrastructure. But there are also many advantages to working on brownfield sites, such as functioning infrastructure (access roads, water supply, landfill). They may need repairs but are already constructed. There may be a local workforce that is already trained and, sometimes, government incentives to redevelop the region. The advantages and disadvantages of developing a new project on both brownfield and greenfield locations is summarized in Table 10.2.

Who Should Be Involved?

The success of a community design workshop will depend in part on who attends the workshop. In small communities, you can invite the entire community but in larger communities having everyone attend can result in too many people to be constructive. Some teams focus on local representatives who are involved in planning or local government. But it is important to get input and build support from a broad range of the local community. Some groups that should be invited (adapted from National Charrette Institute¹) include:

1. Decision makers like include regulators, departmental managers, or local elected officials
2. Groups that are historically left out of the public process, including indigenous communities, youth groups, and women's groups
3. Individuals directly affected by the project, especially people whose property or business is affected and those living or working within the project area
4. Individuals who may provide valuable information for the project and project area, including members of the local indigenous community, academics, or experts in the local area
5. Stakeholders who have the power to promote the project, including local business association or chamber of commerce
6. Stakeholders who have the power to block the project

Workshop Process

The process for a community design workshop will vary depending on the type of major project, the location, and the degree of impact on the local community. For public infrastructure projects like highways and public transit projects, community workshops could form a core part of the development of the project and require numerous multiday workshops to get the required level of engagement and input to the design. For resource or industrial projects in a remote area, there may be a need for frequent and elaborate public engagement, but there are still numerous benefits to engaging the nearest communities, especially for linear infrastructure, including roads, rail lines, ports, and utilities (water and electrical).

The design workshop should always begin with introductions to the project team, an outline of the project, and the format of the workshop. Depending on whether the local community has been involved in design workshops, it may be necessary to start training on the process of a design workshop, expectations of the participants, rules of engagement, and how the information will be captured and used by the project team.

The workshop can then move to an update from the project team on project details and specific challenges that will be addressed in the workshop. This can include any challenges that the team is currently facing and how they would like the community's help with the design.

The next stage is to engage the workshop attendees in generating new ideas that can be used to solve design challenges or support options analysis. For infrastructure projects, having maps or 3-D models of the project area can be helpful. Attendees can point out areas that are important to the community or locations where the project could be built. Ideas can be captured on Post-it Notes or drawn directly onto project maps. A project team member should take comprehensive notes and record ideas as the workshop progresses.

Depending on the level of engagement required by the project team, the idea generation stage may be useful without any detailed follow-up. But it is often useful for the attendees to review one another's ideas and work through the pros and cons of the design ideas. This can help to identify ideas that have broad support and do not create conflict between different groups in the community. It can also allow the design team to engage in more detailed conversations with attendees on why they are suggesting certain alternatives, and to explain why certain ideas may not be possible due to design limitations or regulatory constraints.

Following the workshop, the design team should prepare a report on the ideas collected, how they are going to be integrated into the design, and where additional work is required to develop the ideas. The report should consider the capabilities of the local community and their preferred method of communication. It is often effective to meet with the community to present the report and explain how the ideas have been used. The updated maps and diagrams that were used during the workshop can be presented to clearly demonstrate the value of the ideas. This not only shows that the project respects the input of the local community, but it also builds trust and helps to maintain the community support throughout the project development.

Opportunity Register

As discussed in Chapter 7, “Managing Risk and Opportunity,” integrating sustainability into project design can include identifying and implementing opportunities to reduce impacts, improve the local community, and deliver better projects. Throughout the project development process opportunities can be included in the opportunity register and used to drive innovation in project design. These opportunities should be included in an opportunity capture plan that documents how each opportunity will be managed, who will be responsible, and the schedule to investigate opportunities and execute on selected opportunities.

Innovation Targets

One way to drive innovative solutions is to establish innovation targets that every project department can work toward. This helps to engage everyone on the project team in generating ideas to improve the project. There are often many small ways to improve a project and these shouldn't be discouraged, but the focus of innovation should be on material or significant changes to the original design. The project can establish a set of innovative targets that can be used to track impacts to demonstrate savings and improvements to senior management, and communicate innovative solutions to owners, regulators, and the local community. Examples of innovation targets include:

• Cost savings in $ of capital cost, $/unit operating costs, or $ of total cost of ownership
• Local job creation in person-years during construction or full-time equivalents (FTEs) during operations
• Local contracting increased by either $ procured locally or as a percentage of $ Local/$ Total
• Environmental impact in tCO₂/unit produced, or tCO₂ during construction
• Schedule improvement in days saved

Innovation Competitions

Another approach to generate innovative solutions to project challenges is to develop innovation competitions that address key risks or opportunities identified during project development. Innovation competitions can be focused on internal teams where the project team including consultants and suppliers are challenged to solve problems. Innovation competitions can also be expanded to include external resources like industry researchers, universities and colleges, and the local community.

Change Management

Developing innovative solutions can create positive benefits for the project but can also create unintended negative consequences. It is important to include change management procedures (see Chapter 5) in the innovation process to evaluate the potential impact of innovation on other project areas.

Trade-off Studies

Trade-off studies or alternatives analysis is the starting point for most technical decision-making processes. They involve researching and completing preliminary design work on a number of possible options for design choice. Traditionally, trade-off studies looked at a comparison of capital and operating costs versus the performance of the selected technologies with some consideration of safety and maintenance. Often the design choice has been simplified to the cheapest capital cost option that meets the basic design requirements.

With an increased focus on project sustainability, it is important for design teams to consider environmental and social considerations in the trade-off study. When assessing the advantages and disadvantages for each of the technical options, the design team can include both positive and negative environmental and social impacts in the analysis. An example for the design of the electrical power supply for a remote facility is shown in Table 10.3. Each of the technical options should also be screened against the project commitments to ensure that the selected design does not cause unexpected regulatory challenges or negative reactions from the local community.

A trade-off study can be used to screen out technology options that do not meet project requirements or are clearly inferior to other options. But when there are two or more technologies that are more difficult to differentiate, where there are more difficult trade-offs between cost and performance, or cost and sustainability issues, then the design team may need to use more detailed analysis like multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), described below.

Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA)

Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a well-established decision tool where options are weighted and scored against a set of factors to provide a ranking of the options. MCDA is very versatile and can be scaled to fit any size decision. For large decisions, the procedure will often require a large team of stakeholders. For simple decisions, however, a single individual with a simple version of the tool can make thoughtful decisions.

Sustainability can be integrated into MCDA tools by ensuring that the decision factors used to determine the best design alternative include social and environmental factors, as well as the traditional economic and performance factors.

The concept of including environmental and social factors in design and decision making is found in a number of different major projects, including transportation and aviation projects. It is central to the concept of context-sensitive design; the Transportation Research Board states, “A vision for excellence in transportation design includes these qualities:

• The project satisfies the purpose and needs as agreed to by a full range of stakeholders. This agreement is forged in the earliest phase of the project and amended as warranted as the project develops.
• The project is a safe facility both for the user and the community.
• The project is in harmony with the community and preserves environmental, scenic, aesthetic, historic, and natural resource values of the area.
• The project exceeds the expectations of both designers and stakeholders and achieves a level of excellence in people's minds.
• The project involves efficient and effective use of resources (time, budget, community) of all involved parties.
• The project is designed and built with minimal disruption to the community.
• The project is seen as having added lasting value to the community.”²

Similarly, the Sustainable Aviation Guidance Alliance suggests taking “a holistic approach to managing an airport so as to ensure the integrity of the Economic viability, Operational efficiency, Natural Resource Conservation and Social responsibility (EONS) of the airport.”³

Decision Factors

Similar to the trade-off study process described above, using MCDA to make sustainable decisions requires that the three traditional elements of sustainability are combined with a performance or operational factor. Depending on the language that is being used in your project, this can create a set of decision factors that adds “operations” to the economic, social, and environmental factors of sustainability. Or it can create a set of factors that adds “Performance” to the traditional triple bottom line approach of people, planet, and profit, as shown in Table 10.4.

Lifecycle Assessment

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool that has traditionally been used to evaluate the environmental impacts of products across the full lifecycle from resource extraction to manufacturing, use, and disposal. The LCA process can be adapted to assessing the impact of projects or the impact of a particular design decision or collection of decisions, especially to evaluate the project's carbon or water footprint. For example, a decision to transport materials by rail or truck can be supported by calculating the carbon footprint of both options to understand the potential carbon reduction of transporting materials by rail.

Developing the project's carbon and water footprint can not only help decision making but can support reporting to groups like the Carbon Disclosure Project, calculating the impact of future carbon taxes, and, in the case of natural resource or production facility, providing input data to LCA analysis being completed by the organization's customers.

Performing a full LCA for many project decisions is often not necessary so the design team should select an approach that meets the level of accuracy that is required for the decision. A streamlined approach is often sufficient to provide an indication of how to compare the design options. The first step in a streamlined approach is to choose the key factor that will be used for the LCA depending on the expected impacts of the design. Indicators that can be used for an LCA include area of land disturbed, resource consumption, energy use, water use, carbon emissions, or waste production. For example, a decision to select an energy system would look at energy use or carbon emissions but a decision about construction methods might look at area of land disturbed.

The next step is to screen the decision options to see where impacts are created along the lifecycle. This is also an opportunity to look for innovative solutions to find ways of changing the details of the design option to reduce the largest impacts. For example, if food supply for the construction activities has a high impact from transportation of materials to the job site, then there may be opportunities to look at local supply to reduce the largest impact. This analysis can be captured in a summary table, as shown in Table 10.5.

Once you have identified the key impacts for each of the design options, the next step is to calculate the footprint of each of the options. Comparing the area of disturbed land can be fairly straightforward but calculating carbon footprints should be done using accepted methods so that the results can be used for future reporting, if required.

Like all decision tools, LCA has issues that need to be reviewed before making a design decision based on the output of the assessment. Some key issues include:

1. A focus on one environmental aspect like carbon footprint without looking at other impacts that may be important
2. Analysis to reduce impacts on a global level (carbon footprint) that might create higher local environmental impacts
3. Decisions that are based primarily on the environmental aspects that ignore or deemphasize the social impacts to the local community
4. Failure to include impacts that are harder to quantify and therefore difficult to include in the calculations

Environmental Economics

Another approach that is similar to lifecycle assessment is environmental economics, which uses a financial analysis of a wide range of project impacts to evaluate design options. This provides an alternative decision approach to LCA in cases where there are competing decision factors that might include economic benefits of the project versus environmental damage versus both positive and negative social impacts.

Environmental economics is well developed for public infrastructure projects where it considers the choices that people make and the costs and benefits of design options. For example, the design of a public park would consider the benefits of people enjoying the facilities and the surrounding nature by predicting the number of visitors, time spent in the park and the financial value of that time.

The process can also be applied to other types of projects where the facilities will have an impact on the local community or on the environment. The process allows the design team to meet both project economic and sustainability goals by weighing the costs and benefits of design alternatives.

Safety in Design

Safety in design principles can be applied to climate adaptation that includes how local weather events like natural disasters and rising temperatures can have an impact on human health and safety. This can include a broad range of topics from the safety of employees during extreme weather events to the health of employees and the local community that can be impacted by disease spread due to flooding or poor air quality from forest fires near the project.

Weather During Construction

Climate change is causing an increase in the frequency and severity of storms and rising temperatures that can directly affect project construction. Construction planning needs to include emergency response and health and safety plans that incorporate extreme weather, storms, and heat events. This could include scheduling construction activities to avoid the riskiest times of year for weather events, including scheduling of work crews that are being flown to remote sites and could be stranded by bad weather.

The design of construction equipment like cranes and scaffolding needs to take into account potential weather events so that equipment will survive extreme storms or can be taken down quickly if an extreme storm is forecast.

Weather During Operations

The same principle applies to the design of structures and equipment for full-scale operations. The project design needs to incorporate resilient infrastructure that can withstand more severe storms, wind, increased precipitation, and flooding. Many regions have rules to protect waterways that require infrastructure to be built a certain distance from the high-water mark, but increased flooding is changing the high-water mark. If your project is located near water, the design needs to evaluate if increased flooding will put infrastructure at risk or change the high-water mark on nearby streams and waterways that will limit where you can locate infrastructure.

Sea Level Rise

Similar to flooding risks, docks and near-water infrastructure on or near oceans could be impacted by rising sea levels and extreme storm events that increase storm surges and damage project facilities. Design work should include conservative predictions of sea level and storm damage to ensure that infrastructure is resilient and safe for workers.

Impacts to port facilities can also have an effect along the project supply chain. Logistics plans for both construction and operations should include contingency for extreme weather and rising sea levels that might impact shipping for equipment suppliers and product shipments.

Water Shortages and Droughts

With rising temperatures and changes in precipitation, increasing areas of the world are being impacted by drought and water shortages. If your project is located in an area that is currently facing these challenges or is predicted to face these challenges in the future, then the project design should incorporate water management strategies not just to manage the project's water supply but also to consider how the project could have an impact on the local water supply either through damage to existing water resources or through competition for scarce water resources. Protection of the local community's water supply is one of the areas where projects can face the strongest local opposition to the project development. So a well-developed water management plan is critical not just for creating a successful project but also for maintaining community support for the project.

Biomimicry

One field of study that project design teams are investigating to help build more resilient projects is biomimicry, where concepts from nature are used to improve designs that often have a lower total cost of ownership as well. These concepts have led to buildings designed with termite mound structures to provide natural air flow and cooling to stormwater management systems that use natural streams instead of culverts and pipes.

Nature-Based Solutions

A related approach is to use nature-based solutions (NBS), also referred to as ecosystem services, which recognizes that the natural environment is a resource for project development and operations. NBS is defined as “actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural or modified ecosystems, which address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, while simultaneously providing human well-being and biodiversity benefits.”⁶

These concepts have typically been used for the development and restoration of natural resources for public infrastructure for water management and managing severe storms. But they can also be used to improve the design of any major project. The concepts of NBS can be applied to a number of project design areas, including:

• Improved water management and security to support facility operations
• Disaster risk reduction by providing natural buffers for flooding and extreme weather events
• Mitigation of increased temperatures by using natural surfaces to reduce heat-island effects around project facilities
• Improved ecological restoration as part of progressive reclamation or closure requirements (see Chapter 14)

Logistics Footprint

Projects often limit the assessment of their environmental footprint to the boundaries of the project and do not consider the impact of transporting materials to and from the site. The design and project planning should consider where equipment, materials, and supplies are coming from and how they will reach the project site. Transporting materials by rail or ship has a lower carbon footprint than transporting by truck. Buying local can reduce the footprint for transportation and support the local economy.

Carbon Pricing Scenario Analysis

The cost of carbon can have an impact on the design and operation of a project and the range of possible carbon pricing should be included in feasibility studies and design options analysis. The current average carbon price is approximately $US 16/tCO₂ (in 2018) but economists have determined that carbon pricing as high as $200/tCO₂ may be necessary to control carbon emissions.

The project team needs to establish a project forecast based on a standard set of assumptions that can be used for all decision making. This will help ensure that informed decisions are made that will protect the project and the organization from future risks.

One example is from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), that provides funding for global projects, and has developed a range of carbon prices that start at $30/tCO₂ and increase to $80/tCO₂ by 2050:

The International Finance Corporation (IFC) has operated a carbon pricing pilot since November 2016 using price levels of US$30/tCO₂e in 2016, increasing to US$80/tCO₂e by 2050. The price is applied to the economic rate of return analysis of project finance investments in the cement, thermal power and chemicals sectors, and is considered as one of several inputs into the investment decision. The price is applied to gross Scope 1 and 2 emissions. The IFC is moving to full implementation in project finance deals in the three sectors listed above, and plans to pilot the application of a carbon price to project finance investments in other sectors with annual emissions above 25 ktCO₂e.⁷

Future Proofing the Design

Climate change won't just change the weather and the operating costs of the project; it is also driving technological change that will have an impact on operating the project. Project teams need to consider in their design work the rapid evolution of renewable energy, energy storage, electric vehicles, and other technologies that reduce energy use and carbon footprint. These changes are accelerating, and the project should include scenario analysis that looks at the future of energy and carbon management, can help teams to understand potential changes, and to design the project with the ability to adapt to changes over time. These changes could also include the evolution of other technical trends that could impact projects, including the Internet of Things (IoT), electrification, and autonomous vehicles.

Renewable Energy

One key area of design that projects need to consider is the use of renewable energy to replace traditional hydrocarbon power systems. Using renewable energy like solar and wind power can be more complicated to design than a diesel generator, but recent advancements in energy storage and micro-grid energy management has made these systems much more reliable for facility operations.

Industrial facilities also have the opportunity to adapt renewable energy and energy storage to fit with the requirements of an industrial facility instead of the requirements of the electrical grid. These facilities can find ways of integrating renewable energy and energy storage directly into facility operations by looking at nonelectrical applications. One example is solar thermal systems that can store thermal energy for future electrical generation, operate as combined heat and power (CHP) plants, or provide thermal energy for industrial processes such as heating, drying, or distillation.

Climate Impacts versus Project Impacts

Another reason to look carefully at the potential impacts of climate change is to understand that climate change could have an effect on the local ecosystem, which adds to the environmental impacts from the project. The combined impacts could create unexpected consequences that could be viewed as the impact of just the project. The design of water use, emissions controls, and environmental footprint for the project needs to incorporate the potential for climate change impacts to be additive and for the project to become responsible for the combined effects of project impacts and climate impacts. If your facility is near an ecologically sensitive area or an area that is expected to go through major changes due to climate change, then it may be necessary to manage the project's impacts more carefully than required under regulations.