A consultancy built out of a drilling contractor.
Technical HDD was the horizontal-directional-drilling and trenchless-pipeline arm of a western Canadian energy services group. From 2005 to 2018 it worked out of five bases — Spruce Grove, Grande Prairie, Fort St John, Calgary and Vancouver — running a thirteen-rig fleet from a twenty-tonne walk-over machine to a three-hundred-and-seventy-five-tonne maxi rig.
What happened to the rigs
They were sold. The drilling business was wound down, the fleet went to other operators, and the name was retired to an archive. What did not get sold, because it could not be, is the part that took thirteen years to build: the engineering method, the drill records, the standard operating procedures, the tooling knowledge and the judgement of people who have watched several thousand bores either work or fail.
Technical HDD has been brought back deliberately as a consultancy — the one form in which that asset is actually worth something to somebody else.
We are a professional services firm. We hold no rigs, no crews and no construction contracts, and we are not available to drill your crossing. If you have arrived here looking for a contractor, the independence page explains who to call instead.
What we carry forward
The design basis
Pull-force allowables by pipe size, design radius, depth of cover, hole sizing, entry and exit geometry, and the annular-pressure envelope — as operated, not as theorised.
The procedures
A safety management manual, a quality manual, the safe-work procedure series, an environmental execution plan and a certification matrix mapping every role on a spread to the tickets it requires.
The drill record
Named crossings with pipe size, installed length, hole diameter, geologic formation and the method used on each — plus rig-by-rig site-layout sheets and a full engineering drawing set for a rig built in-house.
The method family
Several named methods and tools came out of this practice and are still in use in the field. They are described in full under the method. In short:
- Trenchless pipeline technology — product pipe pulled through a bored hole with the surface left intact, used as the primary means of mainline construction rather than only at crossings.
- Minimal impact construction — working inside a five-to-eight-metre corridor instead of a full open-cut right of way.
- Vibratory hole packing — tooling that conditions and extends the bore, taking a single steel pull past a kilometre where a standard shot would stop short.
- Pullback monitoring — tracking the reamer and the pull against the pilot as-built in real time, so a raised intersect or a foreign-line approach is seen while it can still be corrected.
- Producing-line replacement — replacing a live line along its own corridor without taking the ground it runs through out of service.
These are proprietary methods developed and proven in the field, and the names have been used in commerce. They are not patented and no trade mark has been registered for any of them. We say so plainly because we have seen brochures claim otherwise, and a consultancy that overstates its own position is not much use for checking anybody else's.
Where we are
Spruce Grove, Alberta, working across Alberta and British Columbia, and further where the crossing warrants it. Correspondence goes to enquiries@techhdd.com.
A consultancy, and only that.
It is worth being explicit about the things we deliberately are not, because each of them is a way this kind of advice usually gets compromised.
- Not a contractor. No rigs, no crews, no construction contracts, and no ambition to acquire any.
- Not a broker or a dealer. We take no fee, commission, rebate or referral payment from any contractor, rental house, tooling supplier or fluids vendor.
- Not a full-service engineering house. We have no survey group, no environmental team and no pipeline design practice. Trenchless is the whole of what we do, and we work alongside the firms that cover the rest.
- Not a software company. The instruments on the tools page were built for our own crews. They are not licensed products.
- Not a staffing agency. When we send an engineer to your site they are ours, under our insurance, reporting to you against a written scope of authority.