February 2013, Vol. 240 No. 2
Features
Completing A Challenging Directional Drill In The Marcellus Shale
Your geologists found natural gas hiding thousands of feet underground. Your legal team negotiated rights of way with landowners. Your drilling team went down a mile or so, made a horizontal turn and “fracked” the shale bed, releasing the gas. Your well is producing. So now what? Now you have to get the gas from the wellhead to the waiting world. It means laying gathering lines from the wells and connecting them to larger distribution lines. It means that every time you have to cross a stream, wetland, road, mountain or other obstacle, you’ll have to employ horizontal directional drilling (HDD) technology. That is, you will have to bore beneath it. In northeast

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