PIPELINE NETWORKS
Pipeline Design Engineer, Rehabilitation Engineer, Operations Engineer, Contracts Engineer, Network Analysis Engineer

The Sector
Pipeline networks are the underground conduits for clean water and wastewater. There are around 350,000km of water pipes and a similar length of sewer pipes in the UK. As water pipes have an asset life of 100 years, 1% should be replaced each year at a cost of £400m, plus a similar figure for maintenance, and the same again for sewers – a huge undertaking.

Water pipeline networks distribute water from treatment works to taps and bring water to the treatment works from various sources such as rivers, reservoirs and boreholes. These water channels tend to be in large pipes, aqueducts or tunnels, with the water travelling under gravity, unlike distribution pipes, which are predominantly pressurised. Wastewater pipes take sewage away to treatment works, from which large pipes or culverts discharge the cleaned water to streams, rivers or the sea.

Sector Profile
There are around 20,000 people employed in pipelines, including non-technical operatives, administrators, designers and engineers. As technologies improve, the number of pipe operatives and design engineers will reduce but opportunities for qualified engineers able to use the computer software analysis packages are likely to increase.

Issues and Trends
Water companies have a significant number of pipeline engineering staff who carry out the infrastructure assessment of performance internally. However installation work has been increasingly issued to contractors through competitive tender. Water companies have increased the scale of contracting to include annual main-laying and maintenance contracts. And more recently, design, supervision and management of the smaller projects, plus network analysis and leak detection, are now carried out by consultants.


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