Digital tools help United Utilities enhance carbon management

With its huge £13 billion investment period underway, United Utilities and its partners are harnessing digital tools to drive its carbon management.

The water company for the North West is ambitious about accurately measuring - and reducing - the carbon impact of its activities as it delivers the largest environmental programme in the region for more than a century.

Now, United Utilities has partnered with Mott MacDonald to embed the engineering, management and development consultancy’s Moata Carbon Portal into its AMP8 capital delivery programme to enable it to accurately measure the carbon impact of both the construction and whole life operations of its infrastructure projects.

Moata Carbon Portal is an important tool in supporting United Utilities deliver its Net Zero ambitions.

Kaz Kundi, Principal Engineer, Carbon, in United Utilities’ engineering innovation team explained: “We have been measuring the carbon impact of our projects for seven years, but as we are now working with more partners than ever before, finding a consistent approach to doing this was proving challenging.

“During the last year we have worked closely with the team from Mott MacDonald to embed Moata Carbon Portal for us and our tier 1 and tier 2 delivery partners. It is very encouraging to see how this digital tool has been embraced by our partners and it is now being used across the capital programme.”

Moata Carbon Portal enables project teams to produce whole life carbon assessments using the latest industry-standard emissions factors, in addition to utilising United Utilities’ asset carbon models. It can also be used to review carbon hotspots across projects and programmes, enabling teams to prioritise carbon reduction across key assets and materials.

Kaz Kundi added: “Utilising digital tools for carbon management and measurement is important as it helps streamline the process of collating and analysing carbon data. Moata Carbon Portal is an exciting step forward as it enables us to collaborate and share data more efficiently with our delivery partners giving us all improved carbon insights across our capital delivery programme.

“As well as giving us a better understanding of the carbon impact, the data will also help our engineering teams make informed decision to drive down carbon costs.”

Priyesh Depala, Mott MacDonald’s senior principal decarbonisation consultant said: “Our Moata Carbon Portal creates a single repository of carbon data for a broad group of users. As the bank of data grows, so too does the intelligence gathered from a wide range of projects helping raise awareness across the whole supply chain.”