Horizontal Directional Drilling

greenpower

I'm looking at the financial costs and feasibility of a directional bore. The analysis I'm doing is for a water pipeline.

The details are;

Seeking to directional bore a water pipeline of diameter 550 mm through a depth approximately 10 meters over a distance of 995 meters.

The depth is a gradual increase from 0 – 10 meters.

The soil is sandstone / grey wacke.

Anyones help on information regarding financial costs and/or feasibility would be much appreciated.

Pete_Cavan

greenpower wrote: »

I'm looking at the financial costs and feasibility of a directional bore. The analysis I'm doing is for a water pipeline.

The details are;

Seeking to directional bore a water pipeline of diameter 550 mm through a depth approximately 10 meters over a distance of 995 meters.

The depth is a gradual increase from 0 – 10 meters.

The soil is sandstone / grey wacke.

Anyones help on information regarding financial costs and/or feasibility would be much appreciated.

The depth of 10m cant be right, what you are talking about (a gradual increase from 0 – 10m) is more like drilling an oil well (reminds me of Mr Burns' "Slant Drilling Co" in The Simpsons)! Digging pits that deep would be a massive job, not to mention that you would no doubt you would be in rock and would require a more specialist (and expensive) type of drilling like auger boring or microtunneling which would not be feasible unless you are extracting oil. If you are trying to reach a water source 10m below ground, you would be better off boring a verticle well and then pumping the water through the drilled pipe, preferable no deeper than 2m. I am assuming you are aware that with drilling, you will still need to dig launch pits that are roughly 100m apart.

I am not sure what you mean by "The soil is sandstone", generally if the ground has c[SIZE=-1]obbles or boulders[/SIZE] it wont drill. Sandy soils would not drill either because the tunnel would collapse. You would need to dig proper trial holes and bore pits to know if it will work, and even then you may be disappointed.

Is 550mm the internal or external diameter? Drilling pipes usually requires SDR 11 pipes but when you get to bigger diameters, SDR 17 may suffice, I am not sure. 560mm external diameter SDR 11 would leave you with an internal bore of 458mm. For 550mm internal bore in a SDR 11 pipe you would need a 630mm OD pipe (which is the next size up from 560mm). All the above is assuming you can use standard HDPE pipes and you wont have pressures of more than 16 bar. Not really sure why you would need such a large diameter pipe anyway, unless you are looking to supply water to Galway city! The volumes of water that pipe would carry would be massive and the pumping equipment needed would extremely expensive (both to install and to run).

Are you sure about the depths and size of the pipe? I cant think of anything that would require such large volumes of water and would justify the cost of what you have described, unless you are getting into fracking!

djpbarry

Moved from S&EI.

muffler

And moved to C & P

melly101

Bothar are a directional drilling company I have used previously - They know thier job and can talk you thru it.