Protecting and strengthening water pipelines

The Path to Drawdown: Water Distribution Efficiency

Water utilities are among the largest consumers of electricity globally, corresponding to about 1% of total electricity use. Up to 80% of that energy is used for pumping water alone. But ~35% of that water is wasted in the distribution network through pipe leakage, meter error, and unauthorized consumption. This dramatically reduces the supply of water over time and produces unnecessary emissions.

Two major water efficiency solutions already exist that can minimize this leakage: pressure management and active leak detection. Pressure management involves installing pressure valves at water inlets and outlets to better monitor the flow of water and pressures, and leads to reductions in pipe bursts and leaks from broken pipes. While addressing leaks takes financial investment, it’s the cheapest way to source new supply. These strategies also serve growing urban populations and reduce GHG emissions.

Project Drawdown estimates that, if 38-47% of the global water distribution network can adopt pressure management and leak detection solutions, they can reduce CO2e emissions by 0.66 - 0.94 gigatons between 2020 and 2050. That’s an emissions cut equivalent to taking close to 204.5 million passenger vehicles off the road for one year.

About

Aegion Corporation (stock ticker: AEGN) constructs, maintains, protects, rehabilitates infrastructure projects for a wide range of industries, including water, food manufacturing, mining and wastewater. Their products and services protect against the corrosion of industrial pipelines and rehabilitate and strengthen piping systems and structures. They’re headquartered in Chesterfield, Missouri, and they mostly serve customers in North America.

AEGN’s Role in Drawdown

Aegion primarily serves the aging municipal water and wastewater pipeline market.

The majority of Aegion’s Infrastructure Solutions segment’s work is to improve aging pipeline infrastructure in the municipal and wastewater sectors. Their solutions include trenchless, jointless, seamless pipe-within-a-pipe solution designed to rehabilitate pipes in various diameters as a cost-effective solution; fiber reinforced polymer pipes are designed to rehabilitate and strengthen pipelines; high-density polyethylene lining system to rehabilitate pressure pipelines; a combination of PVC plastic with thermal butt-fusion joining technology to provide fully restrained, monolithic pipe to be used with traditional and trenchless installation methods.

Aegion also offers project management, training, research, testing and design, consultation and installation services to mitigate pipeline corrosion.

AEGN: What We Like

We’ll update this section once Aegion makes more environmental and sustainability information available.

AEGN: What We Want to See Improve

Shift Away from Oil & Gas

Aegion’s Corrosion Protection segment (p. 4) primarily serves oil and natural gas pipeline infrastructure developments across North America and internationally. While improving and enhancing the efficiency of onshore and offshore oil and gas pipelines is a win for those companies, it’s a massive loss in the fight against climate change. We urge Aegion’s executives to shift away from oil and gas customers and direct more focus to improving water infrastructure.

Clean Up Supply Chain

Aegion has suppliers across the world (p. 12), but they don’t provide sustainability information regarding their supply chain. We want to press Aegion to nudge their suppliers to reduce their own carbon footprint so that Aegion can cut their scope 3 emissions.

Disclose Sustainability Metrics

Aegion’s website has a sustainability page but it doesn’t provide meaningful information. For climate-conscious investors and other stakeholders to effectively assess Aegion’s carbon footprint, they need to see concrete metrics like direct and indirect GHG emissions, energy used by source, and the amount of emissions avoided. We urge Aegion to report these metrics in an annual sustainability report.