Supply vs Demand – how severe is the current material shortage?
With nearly half a million cases reported globally in the last 24 hours, coronavirus continues to present a direct health risk to many people across the world. Despite this, some countries including the UK are fortunate enough to be confident that they have seen the worst of the pandemic within their borders. As a result, much discussion in recent months has been focussed on recovery and getting life back to “normal”.
Across the world, many countries including China, The USA, France, Australia and The UK have announced significant infrastructure investment as we go forward into a “post-pandemic” world. This will lead to a rise in demand for basic construction materials such as steel, cement, timber and some plastics.
Supply chains have been stressed significantly over the past two years not only by restrictions to movement but by reduced outputs, political events such as Brexit and incidents like the blockage of the Suez Canal. Scarcity of construction materials is already beginning to take hold. For instance, on my site attachment, concerns over a shortage of steel fibre reinforcement (SFR) for sprayed concrete lining of a tunnel shaft are beginning to materialise.
Fortunately, we are able to revert to using steel mesh in lieu of the SFR for the most part but this is more time consuming to construct and leads to increased safety risks from additional working at height, more heavy crane lifts and hot works. What’s more is that a neighbouring team constructing a diaphragm wall on the same site is beginning to see shortage in availability of mesh which could scupper the contingency plan for the shaft.
If SFR and mesh stocks dry up, this situation has the potential to halt progress risking significant delays across the programme. One way of mitigating this might be to call upon the designers to revise specifications and offer alternatives to keep works going without too much increase in cost but the options are no doubt limited for a project that is already well under construction.
Time will tell if design change will be made necessary on my site, but it led me to wonder if anyone else had experienced materials shortages on their attachments (phase 2 or 3 – contractor or design house) and what might have been done to overcome the issue. Can anyone share some of their experience on this matter?
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Max, construction teams are certainly feeling the similarities on this project in Sydney, albeit a slightly different material. As areas of NSW have entered a lockdown due to a spike in Covid cases, critical work in construction is continuing with a ‘skeleton’ engineering team working on site to continue the momentum. However, the substation civil team are experiencing great difficulty in arranging supply of steel bar for concrete reinforcing. They have identified one mitigation, which is to approve reinforcing schedules much earlier than normal. Usually they approve schedules a minimum of 2 weeks before delivery to allow time for production. However, they are attempting to approve schedules atleast 4 weeks before delivery to give the suppliers sufficient time to source material. This has a knock on effect for design; small, intricate design changes must be approved and ‘Issued for Construction’ further in advance and so it seems all areas of the business are feeling the effects!
Hi George, interesting you should mention lead times as that came up in conversation with one of the engineers working on the diaphragm wall (neighbouring the shaft that I’m working on). Their reinforcement is supplied in large three dimensional cages that are fabricated off-site before arriving and being lowered in place and cast in-situ. Suppliers are experiencing extremely high demand for such products at present and it appears that the supply issue in this case is to do with production capacity in fabricators’ yards rather than material availability of steel mesh sheets.
Fortunately in the shaft we can work with the basic sheets of mesh as our fixers trim them to size and position them before they are encapsulated in sprayed concrete. This method does lead to additional waste but we would run into the same issues with fabricator lead times if we were to order non-standard sizes. The additional costs (financial and environmental) related to this solution are far outweighed by the time saved in continued progress instead of waiting for SFR to become available again.
Max, the issues we are experiencing on site are similar to what you mention in response to George’s comment. With an increase in demand for materials in the NE of England it is clear that suppliers are struggling to meet this demand rather than having a shortage of materials; that being said we are not using any materials that are particularly specialist. We construct reinforcement cages on site, concrete is cast in-situ and along with imported fill of varying specifications the notable change has been the increased lead times required for these basic materials as suppliers struggle to increase capacity. It will be interesting in the coming months though to see if this increased demand causes shortages in the supply of even basic materials further down the line.
As Max says, the steel cages for the D-wall I’m constructing are causing issues. There is steel shortages for the yard to procure and they have over committed themselves for both producing fabrication drawings and fabricating the cages themselves. We are unable to find alternative yards to supply as they are all occupied. Ironically it is the Arcelormittal yard at Chatham Dock which has over committed and under delivered!
More blame on HS2!
https://inews.co.uk/news/consumer/hs2-rail-shortages-building-construction-materials-hgv-drivers-1187134/amp