From the simple to the complex, we look forward to learning more about your project.
Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD) is the right tool for installing underground pipelines, conduits, and cables without disrupting the ground surface.
We specialize in projects that face obstacles like rivers, roads, urban landscapes, or environmentally sensitive areas.
Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD)
Our fleet of HDD equipment and crews brings the experience to navigate complex challenges. And our culture brings a problem-solving attitude. So when problems arise, we don’t just bring you problems. We bring solutions.
Industries Served
Industries that best fit our experience.
Precision is the name of the game in public utilities, and our crews offer seamless integration for water, sewage, gas, and telecom.
Here’s why HDD is perfect for the job:
- Low disruption: HDD installs or upgrades utility lines with minimal surface disruption compared to traditional trenching.
- Better precision (and safety): HDD navigates around existing utilities and natural obstacles, avoiding utility strikes and enhancing safety.
- Low environmental impact: HDD reduces the project footprint and minimizes environmental impact.
HDD is ideal for urban infrastructure development due to its ability to extend utilities without disrupting the surrounding population.
- Minimal Surface Disruption: Roads, sidewalks, and public spaces remain untouched, reducing physical and visual construction impacts.
- Ideal for Sensitive Areas: HDD preserves the integrity of historic and architecturally significant neighborhoods.
PDB’s experience and values align with the technical and community needs of urban development, ensuring efficiency, precision, and minimal disruption.
Contact us to learn how our expert, non-invasive methods can assist your next project.
Public works projects bring two main considerations: technical and human.
The Technical part of HDD offers precision and minimal community disruption, unlike trenching, by avoiding surface disruption and navigating around existing utilities and obstacles.
PDB prioritizes serving people, considering all stakeholders. We are always prepared to explain the project’s benefits to the community it serves.
HDD’s precision minimizes environmental impact, preserving soil, ecosystems, and existing utilities during installations or upgrades.
Paired with advanced utility detection tools, which reduce the risk of damage to existing infrastructures, HDD fits well as a tool when broader regulatory and environmental concerns come into play.
PDB’s crews stay current on regulatory compliance and work closely with on-site teams. And because HDD is such good a fit for these kinds of projects, our teams consider low-impact operation the default mode.
Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD) adds efficiency to transport and infrastructure projects, limiting disruption and accelerating completion. HDD allows infrastructure installation and upgrade under roads, parking lots, and rivers, without long road closures. HDD shortens project timelines and reduces inconvenience to the public.
Our crews navigate complex challenges, like crossing under rivers to lay utility lines or threading conduits under heavily trafficked roads, preserving landscape and urban infrastructure.
HDD’s versatility makes it ideal for applications like roadway improvements, bridge and water crossings, and parking facility improvements.
HDD’s unique capabilities in rock drilling offer the energy sector the ability to tackle installations in the most challenging conditions.
Offering precision drilling for oil, gas, and renewable energy projects, HDD’s capabilities in rock drilling give it advantages over traditional excavation, including dealing with solid rock, to install pipelines and conduits without the excess environmental impact.
HDD reduces unnecessary impact and footprint. For example:
- Pipeline projects to lay oil and gas pipelines across diverse landscapes, including environmentally sensitive areas, without surface disturbance.
- Projects to expand renewable infrastructure, such as geothermal energy lines or offshore wind farm conduits, where traditional methods are unnecessarily excessive.
- Subsurface utilities, like upgrading utility systems for large-scale energy projects, for uninterrupted service.
HDD’s precision makes it well-suited for projects that require sensitivity to the surrounding environment, whether that’s people or the environment. As a trenchless drilling method, HDD reduces the risk of compromise to product quality, health, and safety.
Key Benefits
- Minimizes risks to people and the environment.
- Steerable, trenchless method offers unique solutions.
- Prevents disturbances in pharmaceutical and food production facilities.
- Complies with industry health and safety standards.
- Efficiently updates water systems, electrical conduits, and gas lines.
ENHANCED SAFETY IN HDD
Trenches can collapse. HDD is trenchless.HDD reduces the need for deep trenches, which pose risks such as collapses or falls, limiting a major potential hazard, as well as avoiding existing underground utilities.
COST SAVINGS WITH HDD
If you don’t break it, you don’t have to put it back together again.Trenches break things. While HDD setup is more expensive, its trenchless nature means you don’t have to repair roads and landscapes after the installation. And HDD can reduce the need for traffic control, detours, and other expensive logistical considerations associated with traditional, open-cut methods.
MINIMIZE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
Installation and upgrade without environmental impact.HDD is a trenchless technology, so it requires fewer excavations than traditional trenching. This reduces the disturbance to the environment, including ecosystems and landscapes, such as wetlands, and populated urban areas.
HDD FOLLOWS THE CONTOURS OF THE CHALLENGE
The right tool for challenging jobsHDD pushes pipes and cables under obstacles such as rivers, buildings, and roads without disruption, for urban settings or environmentally sensitive areas where above-ground space is limited or preservation is a priority.
Custom Solutions
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Custom Drilling Paths
HDD lets you design and execute customized drilling paths, navigating around or under obstacles such as rivers, buildings, highways, and environmentally sensitive areas.
Mixed Ground Conditions
HDD rigs can take specialized drill bits to handle mixed or difficult ground conditions like rock, clay, sand, and even frozen ground. Along with its steering abilities, you can choose what to avoid and what to cut through.
On-Grade Installations
For sewer lines, water mains, or anything that relies on gravity flow, HDD uses lasers and other guidance techniques for precise, on-grade installations that require a perfect slope.
Extended Reach Drilling
For large obstacles, like lakes, HDD offers extended-reach drilling without the need for multiple entry and exit points, letting you cross large-scale geographical barriers.
Environmental Monitoring
HDD projects can include custom solutions such as real-time environmental monitoring and mitigation strategies to help you comply with environmental regulations and reduce ecosystem impact.
Integration with Other Technologies
HDD can integrate with other technologies such as GIS (Geographic Information Systems) for precise mapping, or GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) for utility and obstacle detection before and during the drilling process.
Variable Pipe Diameter Installations
HDD can accommodate a range of pipe diameters, from small communication cables to large municipal pipelines, providing flexibility across utility installations.
Multipurpose Utility Installation
The multi-duct approach simultaneously installs multiple conduits in a single borehole, to house different types of utilities such as fiber optic cables, water lines, and gas pipes.
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