WA Councillor Jiang Aizezi joins the ASTT

Aizezi shared his enthusiasm about his new position at the Australasian Society for Trenchless Technology (ASTT).

My name is Jiang Aizezi (Aziz for short) and I’m very excited to join the ASTT as the Western Australia Council representative.

I have been proudly working in the tunnelling and trenchless industry for more than 13 years, and been involved and contributed to the successful delivery of trenchless projects. These projects have involved diverse trenchless techniques including: microtunnelling, pipe jacking, auger boring, pilot boring, and horizontal directional drilling.

I’ve been active in the ASTT space since 2013 and have presented at a number of papers in the No-Dig Down Under Conference, organising or presenting in ASTT technical sessions, and contributed to the ASTT design and construction short courses (on trenchless technology).

I relocated to WA just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 after eight years around the east coast. Since then, I have continued my passion on actively promoting tunnelling and trenchless technology in the WA market.

While the east coast was buzzing with major road and rail tunnelling works, which in turn created tremendous opportunities in the trenchless field, WA has not been so lucky.

After the completion of the challenging Forrestfield Airport Link Tunnel project, the outlook for another major tunnelling project looked to be very dim.

However, a suit of major public transport projects initiated by Metronet have brought the trenchless market to a new height in WA with significant utility/service relocation works utilising trenchless techniques.

Notably, BP KWOL pipeline relocation project stands out as the largest trenchless relocations in the brownfield environment (arguably nationally as well) among these works. 12.5 km of DN300 pipeline was relocated where 11.5 km by HDD, with 12 drill shots varying between 500 m up to 1.4 km , and the depth up to 25 m; 2 DN700 microtunnell railway crossings and remainder open trenched.

Utility asset owners continue to show interest and invest on the trenchless technology. Some major microtunnelling works were awarded last year by Water Corporation, namely the Quins Main Sewer project and Balmont Water Main (BWM) project.

QMS involved 1931 m of DN1800 sewer main (1167 m via microtunnelling) while BWM involved DN1000 watermain by microtunnelling crossing a highway and busy operational passenger railway operated by a public transport authority.

The mining sector north of WA continues to engage trenchless specialist constructors for rail, road and river crossings as well.

Overall, we see a healthy growth on the WA trenchless market. With the continuous commitment on the state and federal level in the transport sector, we expect this growth will continue for the years to come.