Travis Roberts, vice president of Millstadt, Ill.-based Roberts Environmental Drilling, followed his father into the drilling business after high school. Although his official experience with drilling amounts to 11 years, he’s been around it since childhood.
Over the past 17 years, Tim Mulville, president and CEO of Missouri City, Texas-based non-profit Wells of Hope, has helped bring potable water wells to communities across Mexico and Africa. While each mission was, of course, unique, Kendleton Farms — the site of his latest venture — is especially out of the ordinary, and not because it is just 30 minutes away.
Some years ago I had a job as a drilling foreman for a large contractor. Sometimes when we would bid a job, they would ask me to go look at the location to see what we needed.
Readers, you will have to forgive me, for I am going to take a short detour from my series of columns about clamp-on pitlesses. I recently had occasion to pull a pump that I had installed years ago and, not having a pump hoist available, did it the way we used to do it.
The failure of a critical pump in a mining operation means unplanned and extremely expensive downtime, which can escalate into hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue in just a few hours’ time.
It’s a beautiful day for drilling! That’s the message from thousands of drilling crews each time they head to a new jobsite. Fighting back against a turbulent economy with a shiny new contract in your pocket is a big part of our industry’s new reality.
When pumpable, one-step, high-solids grouts hit the market in the late 1980s, solids content ranged from 20 percent to 30 percent. There were two-step pumpable grouts already in the market at that time and these were less than 20 percent solids.
I bet a lot of readers think they’re pretty careful — and environmentally considerate — when handling drilling fluids and solids byproducts.
But, I was thinking of this recently as I attended the Underground Construction Technology (UCT) event in Atlanta last month.
