Complex ground conditions, underground obstacles and a tight horizontal window make for complicated jobsites. All these difficult factors are enough to make a project manager lose sleep.
Lance Latimer, Pine Valley Power’s underground construction manager, was facing a job just like this in spring of 2014. They had to perform a 1,030-foot (313.9 m) bore to install a 12-inch (30.5 cm) steel natural gas pipeline. Obstacles included crossing a road, two creeks, railroad tracks, box culverts and existing utilities. Latimer, however, knew his crew was up to the challenge because he had the right tools at his disposal, including the Vermeer BoreAid design tool.
Keeping up with technology
Vermeer BoreAid design tool is used for planning and designing horizontal directional drilling (HDD) installations. Latimer entered information — drill rig and pipe characters, topography, physical obstacles and soil report data — into Vermeer BoreAid design tool, to generate a plan, which included bend radiuses of the bore as well as pipe stress. The plan also calculated things like anticipated pullback load and drill fluid needs.
“It’s a game-changer, quite literally, because it shows your customer that you have kept up with technology in terms of having the best chances of success,” Latimer says. “In our industry, the thing that gives customers a tinge of pessimism is when a contractor says, ‘Ah, we cannot get it,’ or, ‘We failed this bore.’ We want to be the contractor that is their problem-solver.”
Many companies use multiple systems, some developed in-house, to plan an HDD project. This might lead to people having different information about the same job. Design and planning tools like Vermeer BoreAid design tool puts the data in one place, which assists in increasing efficiency and communication on a jobsite. If everyone at the company is using the same planning tool, quality control is likely to improve as well.
Customers want to know your construction company has a strong plan in place, and Vermeer BoreAid design tool allows them to see the plan for themselves. Latimer believes the software will help Pine Valley Power become a full turn-key construction company for its customers by improving the efficiency of its bores and, in turn, opening it up to more jobs.
“It takes a lot of the guesswork out of HDD planning compared with the old-fashioned ways where you kind of are doing maps on the fly, more or less, to determine your trajectories,” Latimer says.
Increased efficiency
Latimer appreciated the ability to identify potential hazards and threats to his project’s uptime. The tool was able to tell Latimer he was likely to have inadvertent returns — a term used to describe drilling fluid leaving the borehole — with his current plan. Inadvertent returns often occur when the downhole pressure is too high and become a concern when the fluids reach the surface or a body of water. Latimer was able to adjust the design in the application, and Vermeer BoreAid design tool showed that the chances of having inadvertent returns were minimized with the new path.
“If a person or company knows what they’re trying to accomplish with the data, it absolutely makes you more efficient,” Latimer says. “There’s so much risk with drilling because you don’t know what’s going on underground. You’ve got to be really analytical and really proactive in trying to assess everything that could go wrong so that you give yourself the best chance for success. Guys who don’t do their homework — that’s when trouble happens.”
Using the information from Vermeer BoreAid design tool not only sped up the planning process but also the time spent drilling. In Latimer’s experience, a job like this would usually take at least two weeks, and his crew finished in eight days. Vermeer BoreAid design tool is one more tool project managers like Latimer can use to finish tough jobs quickly, accurately and efficiently.