CDM Smith Australia Pty Ltd

The CDM Smith team (led by Stuart Richardson) in association with Dr Glen Walker and Ray Evans (Salient Solutions) is pleased to offer this Expression of Interest (EOI) to the Australian Water Partnership (AWP). With over 5000 employees and 125 offices globally, CDM Smith is renowned for providing lasting and integrated solutions in water and environment to public and private clients worldwide. CDM Smith Australia Pty Ltd (CDM Smith) is an employee-owned company with more than 900 staff in the Indo- Asia region. We operate with strong connections between Australia and our operations in India, Singapore and Vietnam. We are currently establishing a presence in the Philippines for water infrastructure. The CDM Smith team provides a range of specialist services related to water infrastructure development, surface water and groundwater management, and environmental assessment for sustainable water supplies to support communities, agriculture, mining and energy operations. We offer advisory services to build capacity within the AWP (and for AWP clients) probide: robust decisionmaking frameworks for strategic surface water and groundwater assessment; simulation of water systems; advice on conjunctive use of surface and groundwater; management planning; and policy development. Our team?s experience is highly aligned with the goals of the AWP; in particular, assisting with the planning of technical assessments to underpin secure and sustainable groundwater supplies for consumptive and environmental users. Our team has developed approaches applied in Australia through the water reform process that marry technical assessments with collaboration with communities to manage groundwater at a catchment-scale.

Organisational Capability

• strategic advice on technical studies to underpin water planning/policy;

• collaboration with stakeholders/water users to understand and plan water management;

• assessment of risks associated with development of groundwater systems;

• development of groundwater management plans and policy for regional aquifer systems;

• simulation of water systems using numerical tools; and

• design of water infrastructure to support innovative management initiatives (e.g. MAR).

Projects

Murray-Darling Basin Sustainable Yields Assessment (MDBSY) and Groundwater Technical Support for the Basin Plan.
The MDBSY project was commissioned by the Australian Prime Minister in response to the drought. The project was ambitious in scope in simulating water management in a large regulated Basin using a large integrated model, assessing the total resource (groundwater and surface water, including interactions), investigating the interactions between climate change and water management, and developing metrics for different users to compare scenarios. The technical assessment was challenging as a range of aquifers had varying levels of stress, varying levels of connectivity to streams, varying levels of confinement, and a need for consistency across jurisdictions and hydrogeology.
Sustainability of groundwater supply in Bandung Province
Around 70% of domestic water and 60% of industrial water needs are sourced from groundwater within the Bandung Basin, Indonesia. Aquifers are significantly impacted with around 40 to 50% reduction in storage. Stuart Richardson led the assessment of the reliability and risks to a regional groundwater supply system. The work informed an investment decision for a water utility on whether to invest in the water supply concession. A concept design was developed for a regional-scale managed aquifer and storage scheme that would harvest water from selected areas of the catchment for storage within the production aquifer system.
Australian Groundwater Dependent Ecosystems Atlas
Jon Fawcett was the technical lead in the nationally significant foundation project mapping groundwater dependent ecosystems, the national Atlas of Groundwater Dependent Ecosystems (http://www.bom.gov.au/water/groundwater/gde/map.shtml). The primary aim of the Atlas is to create a consistent, nation-wide inventory of GDEs, in the form of a web-based tool which displays ecological and hydrogeological information on GDEs across Australia. The work was undertaken in collaboration with State agencies and CSIRO, who developed remote sensing techniques for the project.
Water Allocation Planning for various regions across Southern Australia
The CDM Smith team developed several Water Allocation Plans for Northern Adelaide Plains (draft), McLaren Vale, Peake Roby Sherlock. The projects typically included technical investigations (conceptualisation, water balances and modelling), setting resource condition targets and development of policy. The guiding principle to the work is that the concept of what was safe and (later) sustainable has evolved to a question of what extraction is acceptable given social, economic and environmental goals. A large part of these projects involves liaison with stakeholders to determine the acceptability of proposed water policy.
Groundwater Impact Assessment – Ord Stage 1
Since inception in 1964 the Ord River Irrigation Area experienced persistent groundwater rise, which threatened gross agricultural production of $50-70M per annum. From 2006 to 2009, Dr Tony Smith led a $1M program of groundwater research that culminated in a revised hydrological conceptualisation for the Ord valley and improved projections of salinisation risk. The Ord Stage 1 Irrigation Area Groundwater Drainage and Discharge Evaluation project involved integrated field investigations, data analysis, and numerical modelling of groundwater drainage and discharge processes and associated salinization risk. The outcomes from the project are contained in eight public reports and two international journal papers.
South East Queensland Water Infrastructure Projects
Wyaralong Dam, Bromelton Off-stream Storage and Cedar Grove Weir were constructed between 2007 and 2011 in response to a prolonged drought in South East Queensland. Initially David Murray led the assessment of the yield and reliability of the individual storages and was able to optimise this outcome by taking a system approach to the storage operations. Subsequently David developed the concept design for each storage, risk adjusted cost estimates for budgetary purposes, project programs and participated in the delivery phase of each storage. The combined budget for the three projects was $180M and they were completed within this budget.