Underground works booming in France

"The tunnel activity is doing well. It is carried by a certain number of sites in Paris", rejoices Michel Deffayet, the president of the French Association of tunnels and underground space (AFTES), which holds its triennial congress this week in the capital.

The sector's turnover was normally around 500 million euros per year on average in France. "We have been around for two years around 1,8 billion. In other words, there has been a more than three-fold increase in activity," calculates Mr. Deffayet.

Paris and its region are concentrating in particular work on the future automatic metro in Île-de-France. This "Grand Paris Express" will connect over 200 km to dozens of suburban municipalities, the research centers of the Saclay plateau and the two Parisian airports of Roissy to the north and Orly to the south.

"There are at least 150 projects underway in the (Parisian) region. We had 20 or 22 tunnel boring machines last year," explains Philippe Millard, who chairs the congress. "In France, we have never known that".

However, activity will decrease with the completion of certain sections, before starting to rise again, the professionals predict. "It will drop a little in the next two years and then it will go up again since there are other projects to come", anticipates Michel Deffayet.

In addition to the completion of the Ile-de-France projects, projects for the third metro line in Toulouse or the Marseille rail crossing are emerging.

Above all, the sector expects a lot from the Lyon-Turin rail tunnel, the longest in the world at 57,5 km long, which should link France to Italy by 2030, passing under the Alps. Three contracts worth more than 3 billion euros were awarded in July, marking a decisive step.

In the longer term, professionals are also awaiting the launch of the Cigéo project in Bure (Meuse), where highly radioactive waste must be stored 500 meters underground from 2035.

If France is going through an exceptional phase, the boom in underground work also concerns the rest of the world. According to the International Association of Tunnels and Underground Space (AITES), the sector's global turnover increased from 86 billion euros in 2016 to 125 billion in 2019.

"We can notice that the total turnover of Europe doubled between 2016 (a relatively low year) and 2019 (surely an exceptional year)", it is stressed at ITA.

"The more the metropolises develop, the more the utility of the tunnels - in particular for questions of transport - is very real", summarizes Michel Deffayet.