NADET Institute Plans Workshop on Environmental Drilling and Excavation

The NADET program encourages interindustry and interagency collaboration to achieve significant breakthroughs in drilling and excavation technologies. The NADET Institute, which coordinates the NADET program, has held, over the past year, a series of industry workshops to discuss NADET and to learn what are the drilling and excavation needs that NADET should address through funded research. The NADET Institute is planning to hold a workshop on environmental drilling and excavation in conjunction with the 11th National Conference and Exposition of the National Ground Water Association, to be held April 1-3, 1997 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The workshop will look at where drilling is going in the environmental field and where new initiatives are needed.

Drilling and excavation for environmental purposes can cover the gamut of applications. For example, there is drilling and excavation for clean-up purposes, for storage (nuclear and otherwise), for waste barrier application, for infrastructure construction for environmental purposes (e.g., outfall tunnels), and for resource development. With these applications in mind, the NADET Institute held a planning meeting on December 9, 1996, in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the planning meeting was to put some boundaries on the scope of the workshop, establish the principal issues, and suggest appropriate speakers.

Eleven individuals attended from government (five agencies), industry (two companies, one association), and academe (two universities). The point was made that developments in other fields often drive advances in environmental drilling; e.g., cone penetrometers, sonic technologies, and horizontal drilling have all come from other fields and have been applied to environmental applications.

It was generally agreed that the focus of the environmental workshop should be on horizontal drilling needs, including those that would involve trenchless technology (the North American Society for Trenchless Technologies was mentioned). In order to keep the one-half day session manageable, the group agreed that drilling for remediation purposes, as opposed to waste storage purposes would be emphasized, although there may be advantages to "looking beyond the box", as one participant phrased it and developing a workshop on "drilling for environmental management", that would include remediation and waste storage technologies. It was mentioned that Sandia National Laboratories has completed a study on technologies for shallow drilling, where most environmental drilling occurs.

A number of speakers and potential invitees were suggested for the workshop, primarily from the following fields:

Dawn Kabak and Russ Miller on the NADET Board of Directors have agreed to lead further planning efforts for the workshop.

If you would like to attend the Environmental Drilling and Excavation Workshop, please contact Kate McCoy at the NADET Institute.