We take the "ground" for granted, but are you sure what you're building on? Traditional methods of surveying and modeling the ground suffer from inaccuracies and disconnected data sets. Jason Errey of Clever Planning with Geology (CPG) explains the shortcomings of traditional approaches, and how their digitized approach reduces project risk. In projects ranging from Florida in the US, to ports in the Middle East, to Sydney Harbor in Australia, CPG are redefining Ground Modeling.
Learn more about Clever Planning with Geology here: https://clever-planning.com/
Follow Jason Errey on Linkedin here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonerrey/
[00:00:00] Hugh Seaton: Welcome to constructed futures. I'm Hugh Seton. Today I'm here with Jason airy director at clever planning with geology. Jason, welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:13] Jason Errey: Good morning Hugh. How are you?
[00:00:15] Hugh Seaton: I'm doing well. So let's start with what clever planning with geology means other than a pretty descriptive name.
[00:00:24] Jason Errey: yeah, we do clever planning with geology Hugh. any other questions?
[00:00:29] Hugh Seaton: That's right. That's right. Thanks for showing
[00:00:33] Jason Errey: We look at, we've recognized that our ground modeling as it currently stands does not work. And we're looking to deliver a digital ground modeling solution that is verifiable, digital and auditable by all stakeholders within a project.
[00:00:52] Hugh Seaton: So now we're going to have fun with definitions. Talk to me about what ground modeling means.
[00:01:00] Jason Errey: Ground modeling is trying to get a view of the structural geology that is going to impact your use of the ground. So if you want to build a bridge or a road or a stadium or a house, you need to know what the structural geology is below the ground, so that you can create effective construction strategies to build whatever your a building is or, or meet your objectives.
[00:01:26] Hugh Seaton: And there's a lot to this. I mean, I, you and I, when we were discussing this prior to the podcast, as an illustration of how complicated this can get, you were talking about surf side in the U S and how it's possible that the changing aquifer meant that what used to be freshwater is now saltwater, which meant the clay that someone may or may not have modeled in the past.
They certainly did something, but it may not have been quite as accurate as we're going to get to later. But irrespective of how accurate it was, the fundamental characteristics of that, of the ground may have changed. I mean you didn't go and do core samples, so you don't know, but you can make the assumption that it's a real risk in a lot of Florida, right.
Where it's a certain kind of clay, which you actually know the name of. Because we keep depleting aquifers that there's a very high likelihood that the mechanical characteristics of that ground changed. That's my very simple way of, of understanding some of what you do.
Does that make sense?
[00:02:24] Jason Errey: Yeah, absolutely. So we've done some work in Florida in the past. We know that there are certain areas with glauconites or clays, as you say. And those clays certainly do change depending on whether they're being modeled in fresh water or salt water. And if that underground nature changes over time and that will be changing with climate change. So yeah, if there was a glauconite in that area, then certainly it could have started to undermine the foundations of the building.
[00:02:55] Hugh Seaton: But the point then is that, that that ground modeling is understanding what's what's under you under the area that you care about, probably out to the side a little bit, because pressure does go in different directions and then how it might change over time. Is that right?
[00:03:10] Jason Errey: Yeah. It depends on what you're building. If you're building in a softer, a softer area, like sands or silts, softer soils may be... You know, you do need to monitor that over time.
If you're building in rock, perhaps it's a little less critical to monitor it, but that depends on the nature of the environment you're building in. And this comes back to the initial ground model. What have you got and how are you building it? And then we can also relate that back to sustainability.
Like there's no point pouring concrete. If you've got perfectly good rock on the site, that you can adapt your building to accommodate.
[00:03:46] Hugh Seaton: And the state of ground modeling now is you're not satisfied with, I mean, apart from what you do yourselves, but the state-of-the-art as it's practiced generally, isn't where it needs to be, yeah?
[00:03:58] Jason Errey: No, not at all. we can see the rest of the construction industry moving digital.you know, we, we've got well-established protocols with regard to building information modeling. So we've moved from pen and paper, uh, back in the sixties to auto CAD, uh, products or computer aided design products like Autodesk and Bentley and things like that in, I suppose eighties, nineties, and now.
And now there's a general move to building information modeling, which is trying to capture all kinds of metadata associated with those architectural drawings. And now, again, we're moving from BIM to a full on digital twin, uh, of your construction, which is even more encompassing again. But left behind in all of this is the fact that ground modeling is still analog and very surprisingly your, your audience might be very surprised to realize that there are actually no standards for how you capture data relating to the structural geology under your site.
And then furthermore, how you communicate that to your stakeholders within your construction team. And then to the regulators that regulate what you're building, and then even further to the asset management team for managing the asset through its lifestyle. And there's no standards for that whatsoever.
And so any work that's currently done is largely unregulated and analog in nature, and more or less of a guess and giggle kind of environment.
[00:05:34] Hugh Seaton: " Guess, and giggle," I'm going to take that one with me. Can you contrast how it's done now? Like, what, what do people do now? And let's talk a little bit about what you do instead, but let's start with what, what people do now.
Let's say that you've got a 10 acre site and you need to build something heavy on it, almost for this purpose of this, it doesn't matter what, just something really heavy. What, what happens now?
[00:05:58] Jason Errey: So at the moment, what happens is someone comes along and says, I need to build that there. And then, because you've decided what you're going to build, where the general human nature is, is going to bias all of your studies to building that object there and not looking at whether or not it should actually be built there.
So when you look at how you're going to build something there, nine times out of the 10, you're going to reach for a borehole. And you're going to put that bore hole on key structural elements of whatever you're building. So if it were a bridge, you'd put your ball hole at a bridge pole foundation. If it were a skyscraper or something, you might put it at each of the foundation poles, But you would base your ground modeling campaign on bore holes at the key structural elements of what you're going to build.
And what we like to tell our clients is that it doesn't matter what is at the borehole. It simply doesn't matter. In fact, in a lot of ways, it increases risk if you just do a borehole, because the assumption is made that the borehole is representative of the ground that you need to work with.
Whereas the reality is that a borehole is, what, four inches in diameter. And the borehole only is representative of that four inches, not an inch more. You can't even look two or three feet beyond the borehole and be confident that the borehole is representative of those two or three feet away.
You might have accidentally boreholed into an anomaly. Oh, you might've accidentally boreholed into right next to a vertical feature where the rock vertically drops off to a sand or silt or something like that. So it never matters what's at your bore hole or what's at your alignment or what's in your building corridor it always matters more what's next to it. And how you have justified that the borehole is representative of the ground. And this is what we talk about with verification, unless you can verify that that borehole is actually representative of the ground and not an unusual feature or a mistake during sampling or anything like that, that bore hole increases risk and does nothing to ensure on time and on cost project delivery, nothing at all.
Or that your foundations have been designed effectively.
[00:08:45] Hugh Seaton: That's a startling claim. And I can see how what that, how that might be true, right. Is that there's rock here and not rock there, or there's just the point you made kind of a discontinuity in what's what's going on under the ground.
Certainly the depths that you care about and how deep do you typically care about? Like how, when you talk about modeling and ground modeling, how deep are we typically talking about.
[00:09:12] Jason Errey: So you have to two basic ideas about ground modeling. One is for say oil and gas and mineral exploration, and you care about very big things, very deep a kilometer or two deep.
And you're looking for very big targets, that might be 2, 3, 4 kilometers around. when you're doing ground modeling for civil construction, on the other hand, you're generally looking in the first 40 or 50 meters below the ground. And you're looking for very fine, subtle changes in the geology that is going to drastically impact how you build something and the most effective way you can build something on that site.
So you might be looking for a structure that might be five meters around or 15 feet around. As opposed to, as I said, with mineral exploration, something that is kilometers or miles underground.
[00:10:12] Hugh Seaton: Let's compare that to what you do. So we've talked about boreholes and how they can create more risk than they solve. What do you do instead?
[00:10:22] Jason Errey: So we, we emphasize the targeting of boreholes. So what we do first is we go out and, and we we've actually built a digital geophysical imaging system specifically for, for that first 40 or so meters below the ground.
And unlike all other geophysical methods that are commonly on the market. So traditionally geophysical methods are analog and they only target either the depth to the layer change, or they target a qualitative analysis of the ground. So is it hard or is it soft, but there's no depth in that analysis.
So we've actually figured out, we've built our own digital geo-physical system that is digital in nature and can actually relate structural changes in both height and quality in the ground. It's quite a remarkable system. You got to think of it kind of like the difference between an x-ray and an MRI with an x-ray you just get a basic look at a bone, right?
But with an MRI, you get a full image of inside the body, so the bones and the organs and the tissues around all of that. Where we're closer to an MRI of the ground, and it's really quite stunning, but using that kind of very, very high fidelity, engineering quality data, we can then look at the structural geology at the site and figure out what's going on before we actually put a borehole in the ground.
And so we'll sit down with the client and say, you've got this is your basic structural outline of your site, and this is how you need to target boreholes to gain confidence in, in our initial model. And then once you have that confidence, then you can start to work with your designers to put an effective, sustainable design that's going to meet objective on your site.
Kind of like I think of a, again in the medical analogy if you have a medical condition say a cancer or something like that, It's pointless putting biopsies randomly around the body, or even randomly around where you think the cancer might be. You need to do very detailed imaging of the body before and specifically of that cancer area before you go and put your biopsies into the body.
So you can give the patient some sort of assurance on the type of cancer that may be there. And then how the, how you effectively are going to manage the treatment of that cancer.
[00:12:57] Hugh Seaton: What an interesting analogy. Talk to me about how, the way you approach it lines up with other kind of reality better. You showed a really interesting example of how boreholes and other other means of assessing where things are utterly misaligned with, with what was known because of various other, other survey methodologies about what was going on in the rock. So there wasn't a, not just a, whether they got it right or wrong, is it didn't line up as modeled with what, what was otherwise known about the ground?
[00:13:35] Jason Errey: Yeah, that's right. So when you do legacy or old school geophysical methods, All of them and indeed boreholes as well.
All of these things are boreholes. Like when you take a bore hole in the ground the cheapest dirtiest, nastiest way to do, uh, or fastest way to do a borehole is simply a wash ball where you, you throw down a grinder into the ground and, and, uh the cheapest geology on staff, perhaps the work experience or the intern, is there catching the drilling muds that are coming up with the cuttings and, and guessing about what the ground is and how it relates to the next borehole.
So this whole, whole lot of inaccuracies associated with taking a borehole as it stands. And then similarly with geophysical methods, if you're doing analog acquisition, you need to sit down and look at the analog charts that come out of the acquisition machine and then hand draw on those where you think the geological changes or the structural changes are in the output.
And then funnily enough, all of these analog reports are then put into their own separate volumes and it's up to someone else to go and look at these two reports on, on a PDF or a piece of paper and, and try and relate them together and make a constructive model about how they're going to move forward with construction.
So all of these analog steps, all combined together to add errors and cause the typical project overruns that we see on every single project. So it you know, coming back to your original question it doesn't matter how good your data acquisition is and how accurate your, your data acquisition is.
The second part of all of this is how do you deliver your understanding to stakeholders effectively so that they can make decisions on that. And that's where the digital really comes into play because we can start putting everything into a geology, digital twin. And delivering thousands of pages of reports into a simple, easy to understand, easy to use piece of software that can communicate ideas to everyone.
[00:15:52] Hugh Seaton: That's really interesting. It's also interesting how this parallels other processes and other kind of digital transformation steps you see elsewhere in construction, right? Where it was a mess of this analog thing and that analog thing. And you really counted on somebody to be conscientious and, and pay attention to how these things did or didn't line up and try to make sense of them in a way that hopefully did make sense and help somebody.
And you know, one of the things that I also I recall from earlier conversations with you is nobody's checking sometimes, right? Whether the collection methodology is making sense, whether there are people are lining things up appropriately, because I would imagine they assume what the heck is the ground? Like, "it's okay. Look at how solid it is." So people don't assume that there's the same level of risk there, or the same level of variability there, or the same level of potential to surprise you. So they just take what someone says and, and move on. I mean, look. Obviously there are surveys going on.
And obviously there are engineers who are thinking seriously about this. I don't want to belittle it, but I, I do feel like possibly it gets less scrutiny than it might because there's just this intuition that it's the ground.
[00:17:07] Jason Errey: Well, yes and no. I mean, as I said in the start McKinsey's KPMG, all of these big consultancies all understand that ground is an uncontrolled risk or an unknown unknown.
But on a project there's one person that understands the boreholes. And that's your geological engineer. And guaranteed they don't understand geophysics. So they're only looking at the report and they have no capacity to interpret the report and, and check that the report is all done correctly.
They just look at the results and then try and bring those into their borehole. And when you, when you've got someone, uh an accountant, essentially, that's looking at your project risk and where things have gone wrong, they can see that things have gone on in the, in the ground wrong in the ground, but they have no capacity to even start to understand how they're going to assign risk or assign blame or assign accountability, and then, uh, improve things in the future.
And I think this is a, an issue that we as geologists need to stand up and, and own, and then work through how we're going to deliver changes.
[00:18:29] Hugh Seaton: Really interesting. So talk to me about projects that you're working on now and how you guys make a difference. So we've sort of talked about the importance of this and how the standard operating procedure isn't as accurate or, it isn't addressing risk the way it needs to talk about some projects that you guys are doing now.
[00:18:49] Jason Errey: Yeah. So look as you kind of alluded to, these complex geotechnical and geophysical and even environmental reports, they're riddled with potential errors. And usually these errors are associated with analog processing, or essentially human errors. And so our key goal is that that all of the data that we input in... so our front end product that we deliver to client is now called MyGeoTwin. And we look to encompass all of the geotechnical, geophysical geochemical and environmental studies within this MyGeoTwin environment. And so it gives us a real opportunity to cause to put everything into this MyGeoTwin environment, we actually have to break it down to its first principles and say is everyone using the correct height data? Is everyone working on the same surface? Is everyone using correct colors, are the coordinate systems all of the same, is the PDF correctly built?
All of these basic fundamental questions that an are completely overlooked normally, we have to address to build that MyGeoTwin environment. So for example, we did the, Eden port development in Australia and by doing this, we saved $5 million over business as usual and 24 weeks over the original construction estimates, and that was over 20% of the entire project budget.
In Metro, we did the geological designs for the twin tunnels going underneath Sydney Harbor for the Metro north south development. The owner's consultant, engineering consultant, had spent four years and over $10 million trying to figure out the complex geology there.
And we replicated their work in four nights. And then TransGrid is the main high tension electrical wire supplier in new south Wales in Australia. They were looking at a pilot program that we helped them with. And, uh in, in five minutes we figured out that their geotechnical consultant had accidentally, uh, manually interpreted all their boreholes on the wrong height data.
And things like every single report we get, we always find something wrong with, because there are no checks and balances within the report. And then, and then within how that report relates to the project.
[00:21:15] Hugh Seaton: That's amazing.
[00:21:19] Jason Errey: Yeah. Yeah. And, we've got similar examples in the US cause we've done a lot of work in Delaware And Florida and up in New York and things like that, every single project there we find issues with and help the client understand other people's data.
[00:21:35] Hugh Seaton: Wow. And again, the, the, the reason why this is so consistently a problem is because the fundamental methodology that they're using to collect this information is just there's, there's no way to do it in a way that doesn't produce errors. Is that right?
[00:21:52] Jason Errey: Yes, but that that's not necessarily the problem, that the problem is how it's delivered for stakeholder interaction.
I mean, we, we come at it from the point of view that if the cleaner doesn't understand the gist of our report, we've done something wrong. And you have to have it from that point of view because, almost all major projects has in some way funded by the taxpayer, right? And you have to deliver accountability to that taxpayer. You have to convince the, the taxpayer that you're going to deliver on time and on budget that you're going to deliver a sustainable project and that your asset management is of that, that project is going to be effective. Like it's not going to fall down. The climate change or any other changing aspects.
And if you can't do that, then you have to be held accountable for that.
[00:22:42] Hugh Seaton: Yeah, that makes sense. So where are you turning towards now? So we're, we're, we're kind of coming in for a glide landing here on the podcast. I'd love to look towards the future and, and projects that you're working on going forward and where you see this methodology that you guys have innovated going and what you'd like to with it.
[00:23:03] Jason Errey: Yeah. So look as I've, as I kind of alluded to with the Metro project you know, digital data acquisition of the ground is, particularly in the Marine environment is really, really fast, we're punching out, what, 20, 20 something miles of data, a day per team. And with that kind of... and, and the processing of that data is, is almost instant, right? All you got to do is combine a couple of things together, and then you punch it through an algorithm and it comes out and you deliver straight to the internet.
so this gives us a really, really exciting opportunity to, to, for major strategic assets, like ports and harbors and well-used coastlines, off shore energy precincts, for example. We can uncouple and, and I think this is a real key here for particularly for sustainable design and smart cities going into the future.
We need to decouple ground studies from projects, right? Because as I sort of said to you before, if you, if you come at at a piece of ground and say, right, I want to build that there, you cannot build it sustainably. It just can't be. Because everything you do is going to be biased toward building that project there. Not if it should be built there, right. And if you treat the geology or the structural geology as an asset in and of itself, you can then say, go back to your first principle objectives, right. Which are if you want to get people from a to B, how do I do that sustainably given my existing environment, both in terms of contamination and existing geology, how do I get people from a to B sustainably? do I build a bridge? Do I build a tunnel? Do I build an eight lane highway? Do I build a walking path to a bus, a precinct over there, or a public transport precinct over there?
If you have the geology as a strategic asset, you can make sustainable, smart design decisions. If you don't have the geology, you're forever going to be chasing your tail. And there will be a four year lag between I want to build that there and how do I build that there? So we want to work with asset owners, like state governments, federal governments to start doing, or start collecting this digital twin or digital imaging of the structural geology for a state asset so that we can really get a handle on sustainable design and move forward with the whole smart cities benefits that are coming online.
[00:25:44] Hugh Seaton: You know, it reminds me also this idea of it being an asset in its own right. The part of the country that I'm from the part of the US right north of New York or right east of New York really. They used to do overflights. They still do, but it was it's about once every five to 10 years, they would do overflights and shoot LIDAR down to take elevations.
And the point of it was to really assess what had been built. And that was a public asset. And you're talking about doing is on the ground, but it's the same idea is that by having that kind of information about what is there to be built around or with it, it adds value to that. And these are huge areas, too.
This is 10 square miles in the case that I'm talking about. And in fact, I think it was more like a hundred square miles in a couple of towns got together to do it. So you're talking about big areas in this case, it's much lower resolution than what you're talking about, and I'm sure a lot cheaper per square meter to do, but even so the idea of having an asset that a municipality or a state or a whoever, whatever the public entity is, has that allows people to understand how to build on it and how to maintain it.
I mean you've talked about sustainability throughout the conversation, and I feel like that. That's going to be at, uh a non-negotiable thing to understand is what is the basis on which we are making sustainability decisions. If we don't understand the ground and the things that are happening within it.
[00:27:14] Jason Errey: Absolutely. And you know, the LIDAR is a great example. I mean, other way to look at it in Australia, as well as the bulk of Australia has been mapped on a very coarse grid, using a similar but different digital technologies specifically for the purpose of mining and where are the minerals and so on.
And mining companies can go and access that data, and then look at leasing a mining tenement from, the government. And in a similar way, we can get this kind of engineering class data for key infrastructure assets like harbors and coastlines. And then allow, as you said, municipalities to make key decisions regarding sustainability and livability moving forward.
[00:27:59] Hugh Seaton: That is an amazing way to end our podcast. Jason, thank you for teaching me a ton about ground modelling. And what you guys are up to. I want to end with a question about a project that, that you mentioned to me, that you're currently actually in market seeking some funding for, and I think this is an Australian project, but I want to take the unusual, because I've really never done this on a podcast before, but talk real quick about what you're looking to get done, and let's see if maybe we can help a little bit.
[00:28:28] Jason Errey: So we're looking at mapping the entire Sydney Harbor from the heads 25 kilometers, or I think what 12, 13 miles inland, with engineering class data. And this will be an unprecedented dataset of the structural geology to inform, smart city development in the city of Sydney. And, an incredibly unique asset in the Sydney Harbor.
We hope to map, or we are going to map the entire Sydney Harbor and then see, and then make that data available in various formats. To see how it's going to be used, and then inform and provide value to the government and stakeholders in the Sydney Harbor.
[00:29:14] Hugh Seaton: Very cool. So we're going to put a link in the the podcast where people can connect with you if they're interested in learning more or supporting well, thanks again for being on the podcast.
This has been great.
You're welcome Hugh. And, uh, yeah, thanks for having us.