Directional Technologies, Inc. is an expert environmental horizontal driller firm that specializes in the design and installation of horizontal remediation wells.

Various case histories, articles, and presentations spanning over 20 years of experience can be found under the Case Studies tab and additional technical content can be found under our Symposium Presentation tab.

Factors that an experienced environmental horizontal driller must be knowledgeable about in order to prevent formation damage:

Also, what are the differences between a environmental horizontal driller and a horizontal directional driller?

An environmental horizontal driller uses a specific back reamer to complete the horizontal well.

An environmental horizontal driller employed by Directional Technologies will typically have years of environmental directional drilling experience and many hours working with an experienced senior environmental horizontal driller prior to deploying to the field to execute a project himself.  This is required in order to understand how formation damage can occur during directional drilling for a horizontal well and what steps are taken to prevent this from happening.

One of the key factors causing formation damage is using a too high drilling mud pressure and/or employing overly dense drilling mud.  Mud density should be limited to the minimum necessary to for well control and bore stability.  If the mud density (or pressure) is too great, formation damage can occur.

An environmental horizontal driller who specializes in the installation of underground utilities also attempts to install horizontal remediation wells, often with unsatisfactory results.  Utility installation directional drillers tend to focus on completing the bore as quickly as possible without regard to formation damage because a well is not installed after the bore is completed.  Mud densities and operating pressures are not typically monitored to ensure that these parameters do not exceed those that would damage the formation.  To put it another way, they don’t care if formation damage occurs and likely do not know when it is occurring.

On the other hand, environmental horizontal drillers employed by Directional Technologies constantly monitor mud densities and pressures to minimize the potential for formation damage.  This is probably intuitively obvious to most remediation professionals because the formation has to have sufficient permeability and porosity to convey fluids from the well to the areas of environmental impact.

Drilling fluids are constantly monitored.

As an example, an experienced environmental horizontal driller would immediately notice if mud volumes were to begin dropping off, a sign that drilling mud is being lost to the formation (and a sign that formation damage may be occurring) and take immediate corrective action.  In contrast, a utility driller would likely mix up more drilling mud to compensate for the volume lost to the formation without concern or thought about potential formation damage.

Please feel free to contact us at 1-877-788-4HRW should you have any questions regarding our processes to train our employees to safe, qualified environmental directional drillers.