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Volatile markets, decarbonisation challenges, scarcity of capital and increased stakeholder pressures are driving the need for smarter capital investment and delivery decisions to build asset resilience and performance.
Whether it is debottlenecking or enhancing operations in the resources sector; water providers addressing ageing infrastructure, or transport agencies managing growing asset portfolios, today’s leaders must rethink sustaining capital and how to strategically reinvest in existing assets through planned or long-term programs.
Sustaining capital is not just about maintenance. The opportunity lies in deciding where to focus capital to optimise value and performance across large, complex asset portfolios. As priorities shift from building new assets to enhancing the performance of what’s already there, sustaining capital is a powerful lever for connecting assets to your strategy, managing risk, exploring options, and making informed trade-offs to unlock the full potential of your asset base.
In today’s environment, asset-intensive organisations need to make decisions that balance risk and return while staying agile to anticipate asset transitions, renewals, or closures.
Aurecon’s sustaining capital framework supports this process, ensuring that sustaining capital programs are designed and delivered effectively and with a focus on:
Ensuring that every project and operation is aligned with the organisation’s strategic objectives. This means prioritising only the work that truly adds value, avoiding wasted capital on unnecessary activities.
Delivering projects with a clear understanding of business outcomes, supported by robust scope definition and options analysis. This ensures fit-for-purpose, cost-effective solutions that create value, reduce risk and improve delivery efficiency.
Business decisions enabled by an ecosystem that considers what value means to the organisation and a holistic approach to value that includes economic, licence to operate, organisational transformation, operational and safety considerations.
When capital is allocated to initiatives that fail to align with business priorities, this can lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Likewise, if projects are advanced without rigorous scope definition or thorough options analysis, the risk of suboptimal outcomes increases.
Aurecon partners with asset-intensive organisations to optimise capital investment and maximise asset value, leveraging our deep expertise in advisory, engineering, and digital innovation. By aligning sustaining capital programs with strategic objectives, we enable clients to make smarter, data-driven decisions that enhance asset performance, adapt to evolving market pressures, and achieve long-term business, capacity, and capability outcomes. Our approach delivers on customer expectations, ensuring infrastructure and services that continue to meet the needs of communities and stakeholders.
Our experience working with clients across the entire value chain includes advising, planning, designing, and delivering capital solutions that are guided by a thorough understanding of assets and business operations. We ensure alignment between design and construction of your sustaining capital program via the following:
We support the entire asset life cycle, bringing together expertise in planning, regulatory frameworks, deep technical knowledge and market contexts to co-create solutions that maximise investment value and align with your strategic goals.
Assets exist within complex, interconnected systems that are often managed in silos, leading to missed opportunities and communication breakdowns. We deliver data-driven strategies to bridge these gaps.
As asset engineers, advisors and managers, we design practical, future-proof solutions by aligning advisory, digital, and engineering expertise to minimise value loss and optimise delivery.
Our flexible planning processes respond to changing conditions, preserving asset value and ensuring your program remains resilient and aligned with evolving priorities.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution. But we believe solutions of any size are only effective when they combine a deep understanding of your business and your assets. Our multidisciplinary advisory, engineering and digital specialists will co-create solutions that will transform your strategy, advancing information gathering and institutional knowledge by providing the right information to the right people, at the right time.
See our case studies below:
This world leader in ore refining was facing a critical decision regarding the future of a profitable refinery as assets approached end-of-life. Aurecon used its asset performance expertise, together with digital asset data, to design a sophisticated sustaining capital program to extend the facility’s assets and prioritise the timing of capital investments to free up significant investment cash flow.
Our team developed a transformation roadmap and asset management plans, including lifecycle forecasts and end-of-life trigger points, for the site’s critical assets. We are also providing ongoing advice to evolve business processes and behaviours to drive the cultural and organisational transformation required to successfully execute the strategy.
To secure the future water supply for a large region with population growth and increasing climatic extremes, while managing evolving policy and increasing project complexity, Aurecon is helping this water utility develop and execute a long-term plan for its operations. To deliver greater efficiencies, cost savings and productivity, this client needed to transform its project delivery operating models, sustain its ageing infrastructure assets and introduce new technologies.
We're building an integrated platform to optimise asset performance on a systems basis through a data-based framework at a strategic level to achieve better customer outcomes, cascading through to operational decisions and infrastructure planning actions.
This global miner was optimising the performance and operational resilience of ageing assets at one of the world’s most efficient export centres. Aurecon was engaged to maximise the benefits of the necessary sustaining capital investment for this program of work.
This drove the transformation of port marine structures to be adaptable to future technology, process and environmental changes, whilst remaining adaptable to support export supply and demand.
Our team used digital analysis and modelling techniques to rapidly assess structural designs and identify safety improvements. We then developed a fully integrated, data-rich, digital model with asset information, enabling the miner to introduce maintenance and operational efficiencies over the next 50 years.
By integrating our understanding of engineering design, port operations and construction, we reduced the environmental and safety impacts of asset upgrades. Structures were reused to retain the existing offshore lease boundary, and prefabricated modular structures saved onsite construction materials wastage.
Aurecon is part of a consortia delivering a long-term asset performance program to ensure the continued quality of road transport infrastructure in a major Australian city.
The zone includes most of the city’s bridges and traffic signal sites, and a large share of its road network. The programmed works will ensure that people, places and goods are connected and contribute to social and placemaking outcomes for local communities.
This joint venture enables maintenance to be delivered at-scale and completed with consistency across the city’s portfolio, putting road users at the heart of every decision. Aurecon’s asset management and advisory specialists are contributing as part of an integrated design, construction and operations team, categorising and prioritising the right work based on user needs.
The economic case for integrated asset and investment management in New Zealand and how well-governed infrastructure delivers lasting cross-sector value.
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Group Director, Sustaining Capital – APAC
Principal, Sustaining Capital – APAC
Principal, Sustaining Capital – Australia
Principal, Manufacturing – New Zealand
