Crossing underneath the Mississippi River using horizontal directional drilling sounds like it could be something out of a driller’s fairy tale. Pipeline owner, Boardwalk Louisiana Midstream, made that fairy tale a reality.
I have a soft spot for human achievement. We engineer, drill and tunnel ourselves out of some of the hardest problems imaginable. This month, we write about a project that installed a pipeline for brine under the Mississippi River.
Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have revolutionized natural gas production in the U.S., projected to rise 44 percent from 2011 to 2040 largely due to these technologies.