My first memories of the drilling industry were spending my Saturdays riding along with my father to job estimates and project site assessments. It was the mid-1980s and we would spend the day visiting jobs, ensuring the material was delivered and that the equipment could easily maneuver from the public road onto private land. Before we started our adventure, we would plan our navigation at breakfast with a county plat book. We would meet the customer at the site, and he and my father would evaluate the area where the well would be drilled and discuss any issues.
I continued the same boots-on-the-ground evaluation process in my 20s as the driller responsible for successful job completions. Twenty years later, it’s inconceivable to believe that we were able to get anything done without smartphones, GPS and the internet. Today, 21st-century site evaluation starts with an online map search followed up with an interactive satellite view. The tools given to us by modern technology have become invaluable and a perfect starting point, but these technologies have still not progressed beyond physically walking the next project.