By Emilio Gabbrielli, Global Director – Desalination & Water Security, Sequana
After a career with organisations such as Toray, the Global Water Partnership and Thames Water International, some people may have wondered why I chose to join a relatively young company like Sequana. The answer is both professional and personal: I believe Sequana has something distinctive to offer, and the opportunity to work again with experienced colleagues while helping a young Australian company develop internationally was too interesting to turn down.
After more than 45 years working across the international water sector, I have seen the questions surrounding major water infrastructure change considerably.
Earlier in my career, many of the defining challenges were technical: increasing capacity, improving reliability, developing better membranes and pretreatment processes, reducing energy consumption and determining which technologies would perform best.
Those questions remain important. But as technologies have matured, some of the most consequential decisions have moved upstream.
Today, governments and utilities contemplating major water infrastructure must consider much more than the asset itself.
How should it fit within the wider water supply system? How should future demand and climate uncertainty be accounted for? What is the appropriate procurement and financing model? Which risks should be transferred, retained or shared? How will energy exposure affect whole-of-life cost? How should environmental, regulatory and community considerations influence planning? And will the decisions made today remain sound several decades from now?
Increasingly, the success of major water infrastructure is determined long before construction begins.
Looking beyond the asset
Desalination provides a useful example.
A technically excellent desalination plant is not necessarily a successful water-security solution. The technology is only one part of a much larger system.
Long-term demand, energy, integration with existing infrastructure, environmental requirements, regulation, financing, procurement, operations, maintenance and public acceptance are interconnected.
The commercial model matters too.
So does the way procurement is designed. Risk allocation can determine who is prepared to bid, while unnecessary complexity or fragmented procurement can turn capable organisations away. On major programs, owners also need to consider how projects are sequenced and packaged so they operate as a coherent program rather than competing with one another for the same skills, capacity and capital.
Over the course of my career, I have seen promising projects encounter difficulty because attention was focused on individual aspects of financing or risk transfer without sufficient consideration of the underlying economics and long-term requirements of the project.
The question should therefore not simply be: What can we build?
It should be: What outcome are we trying to achieve, what are the credible options available to us, and which approach creates the greatest long-term value and resilience?
That requires strategic, technical and commercial thinking to come together early.
Not whether, but in what order
The hardest question I now hear from utilities is not which technology to choose. It is what order to build in.
Most systems facing a supply gap will end up with a mix: new or enlarged reservoirs, recycled water, desalination and continued demand management. A plan is rarely wrong about the mix. It is far more likely to be wrong about the sequence. Build storage first and rely on inflows that a drier climate may not deliver? Bring desalination forward for its independence from rainfall, and carry its energy and cost exposure earlier? Lead with recycled water, or hold it back until the public conversation has matured? Each order carries different risks, a different cost profile and a different answer to what happens if the next drought arrives sooner than the model assumes.
What strikes me is how rarely these choices are compared on the same terms. Cost, yield, reliability, environmental impact and community outcomes are usually assessed carefully, but separately, by different teams and often against different standards. What is missing is a consistent, transparent framework that brings them together on a like-for-like basis, one that a regulator, a board, a minister and a community can all read and accept.
The difficulty is weighting. What is drought resilience worth? How should the social and economic cost of restrictions or supply failure sit against capital and operating cost? How do environmental effects that are real but hard to monetise compare with an energy bill that is easy to? Without a shared basis for those trade-offs, decision-making drifts towards whatever is easiest to measure. The cost of producing water crowds out the value and security of water to the community that depends on it, and options that look expensive per unit produced but reduce the risk of running short are quietly discounted.
This is not a technical problem. It is a decision framework problem. It is also work Sequana is doing now and can add most value. The multi-option water security investigations Sequana supports in Australia are built around exactly this: putting reservoirs, desalination, recycled water and efficiency on one consistent basis, valuing the cost of shortage alongside the cost of supply, and testing the sequence of investment against a range of climate and demand futures rather than a single forecast. Done well, that analysis produces more than a preferred option. It produces an order of investment that can be defended, revisited as conditions change, and explained to the people who will pay for it.
Lessons from Australia – applied internationally
This was one of the things that attracted me to Sequana.
Australia has accumulated significant experience responding to water scarcity and climate variability. Its water sector has worked across basin-scale water management, desalination, reuse, advanced treatment and the commercial delivery of major infrastructure.
The Millennium Drought accelerated that experience considerably. Major desalination assets were delivered for Australian cities, followed by the equally important challenge of managing those assets under very different operating conditions – from high utilisation in Western Australia to maintaining strategic capacity elsewhere when rainfall returned.
But the lesson is not that Australian solutions can simply be exported elsewhere.
They cannot.
Every market has its own regulatory, institutional, financial, environmental and community context. What is transferable is the experience gained from making difficult infrastructure decisions under uncertainty – including understanding what worked, what did not and why.
That experience becomes particularly valuable when combined with knowledge from other international markets.
Why I joined Sequana
I have spent much of my career working internationally across technology, utilities, institutions and major water projects, often within much larger organisations. For the next chapter, I wanted to bring those experiences together in a business that is still young enough to be agile, but already draws on deep sector experience.
Sequana offered that opportunity.
What interested me was not simply its desalination capability. It was the ambition to approach water infrastructure from the client’s problem outward – bringing strategic advisory, commercial expertise, engineering, environmental capability and delivery thinking together rather than treating them as separate conversations.
Those who know me also know that I have always liked history. Even the name Sequana appealed to me: Sequana was the goddess associated with the source of the River Seine in the ancient world – a fitting name for a company whose work is ultimately concerned with one of humanity’s oldest necessities, securing water.
It also reflects where I believe our industry is heading.
Making decisions that endure
Water infrastructure is being planned against an increasingly interconnected set of pressures: climate uncertainty, water scarcity, energy costs, environmental expectations, ageing assets, affordability and changing demand.
There will rarely be one predetermined answer.
Sometimes desalination will be part of the solution. Sometimes it will not. The same applies to particular technologies, financing structures and procurement models. And where procurement is required, the model must be workable for the market as well as the owner – proportionate in complexity, realistic in its risk allocation and conscious of the delivery capacity available.
The role of good strategic advisory is not to arrive with the answer already decided.
It is to understand the problem properly, test the alternatives objectively and bring together the technical, commercial, environmental and delivery considerations required to make an informed decision.
After more than four decades in this industry, that is where I believe some of the greatest value can now be created.
And it is ultimately why I joined Sequana.
Because successful water infrastructure does not begin with construction. It begins with making the right decisions about what comes before it.
