From Tunnel to Tee: Pennant Hills Golf Club's Water-Saving 'Win-Win'

The Club now receives up to 300,000 litres a day of treated tunnel water, piped directly from the NorthConnex water treatment plant across the road after a deal years in the making.

Boring through roughly nine kilometres of rock, at 90 metres deep, the tunnel is well below the water table, so it needs to extract and process water to avoid flooding.

Meanwhile, a few hundred metres away across Pennant Hills Road, Golf Club General Manager Barnaby Sumner could see the NorthConnex treatment plant.

"There are sections of the tunnel that go underneath our golf course," says Mr Sumner.

The plan had always been to capture the water, treat it through a purification process and discharge it into a local creek, but NorthConnex wanted to do better than that, he says. 

The proximity sparked an idea. The Club approached NorthConnex early in the tunnel's construction phase, making the case simply: you have got treated water and we can put it to good use which will reduce our reliance on town water.

The response was encouraging but the challenges were formidable.

NorthConnex held existing permits to discharge water into Blue Gum Creek, a tributary of the Parramatta River, and redirecting it required changes to planning conditions.

"Understanding this has taken several years to come to fruition shows you how much time and effort it's taken to come to life," Mr Sumner says. "The key word at the start of this was patience."

The breakthrough came when both parties found their win-win. NorthConnex's management saw value in investing in sustainable outcomes, actively endorsing the repurposing of this water in the interest of supporting local businesses and communities while maximising use of the water as a precious resource.

The Club's own on-site water reclamation plant, installed 20 years ago and making Pennant Hills one of Sydney's sustainability pioneers, produces a slightly saline water.

"Our salty water combined with their very pure water provides a very nice water that we can irrigate our golf course with," Mr Sumner says.

The physical connection between the two sites required drilling a horizontal bore beneath one of Sydney's busiest roads. Working late at night to minimise disruption, the team navigated a maze of existing infrastructure to find a viable path.

The bore now feeds tunnel water directly into the Club's storage tanks, at up to 300,000 litres a day. On a 100-acre course built on remnant blue gum forest, home to 1400 mature and thirsty eucalypts, that volume matters enormously.

"I can put a million litres out a night if I wanted to really give it a good nudge," Mr Sumner says. The security of knowing that supply will not run dry during Sydney's increasingly fierce summers is reassuring for the Club and its 1400 members.

"Members do enjoy seeing that green, lush golf course. In an Australian environment, that's very hard to achieve considering the summers that we go through and endure."

The project recently saw Pennant Hills Golf Club take out the Sustainable Future category at the Clubs & Community Awards, a recognition Sumner receives with quiet pride.

"When we talk about being environmentally sustainable, this club doesn't just talk the talk — we walk the walk," he says.

"We aim to set an example for what good clubs, good corporate citizens and good people in the local community should be doing."

The total infrastructure investment came in around $650,000, which Mr Sumner describes with satisfaction as "a bang for the buck”.

NorthConnex contributed substantial in-kind support while an $80,000 grant from the NSW Government's Community Building Partnership Program helped bridge the gap.

Mr Sumner also offered a special thanks to Thomas Burke from NorthConnex as without his efforts, guidance and support the project would not have come to fruition.

Next on the agenda for the Club is expanded solar capacity and more irrigation targeting, guided by the philosophy Mr Sumner sums up as "every drop counts”.

For other clubs sitting near major infrastructure projects, his advice is direct.

"Have a good relationship with your neighbours," Mr Sumner says. "There is a willingness to do the right thing, but it has to be a win-win for both sides."