Resilience to emerge

In a leaner market, the area of directional drilling starts to feel the economy retaking, pulled by sanitation, gas and—in a lower scale—communication projects

Directional drilling services are gaining space in the Brazilian market. Although this technique came into the country at the start of the 90s, almost in parallel to its birth in the USA, its cost—much higher than that of trench opening—was important in the final choice by the clients.

But the time went on and the Non-Destructive Drilling Method—HDD, how it is called in the technical jargon—is eventually getting a place in the sun. “With more competitive costs, mainly due to the higher coverage of information related to HDD advantages, many companies are contracting our services”, says Liberal Ramos Júnior, director of Silcon Drilling.

The executive—who is also vice-president of Abratt (Brazilian Association of Non-Destructive Technology) is a reference in this industry. After all, he saw the birth of the technique at the end of the 90s, due to the privatization of Brazilian phone-operating companies. “With the concession of the Telebras system, the operators started to invest in less-invasive technologies that would ensure lower impact in the environment”, remembers him. “Until then, all services were carried out by opening trenches and occupying large areas.”

In addition to preserve the environment around the works, HDD makes easy to get the milestones, just due to its lower impact on the place of its installation. “It generates lower noise and dirt in the sidewalks, as well as a minimum of interruptions in the traffic of people and vehicles”, says the expert.

There are many uses for HDD, but undoubtedly it is more present in the areas of sanitation, gas and communications. Generally, this last area pushes HDD to the spotlight when talking about drilling, especially in large urban centers where these works always bring some level of discomfort to the population.

Internally, alias in the underground, the dimensions of micro-tunnels remain very near each other, in each application. The more usual diameters vary—according to the director of Ditch Witch, Antônio Cavalaria—between 63 and 160 mm in urban drilling, being 100 mm the more used diameter. And unit lengths are always 100 m.

In rural works, the length may be higher, since these areas are not standardized in 100-meter blocks as occurs in the cities. And the average diameter is 500 mm. In larger projects, such as those carried out in roads or near riverbeds, for example, the dimensions may vary between 8 and 20 inches of diameter with lengths up to 2,000 m. “Or even more, depending on the project”, says Cavalaria. “We analyze each project with the client.”

Generally, larger pipelines are used for gas and are made in steel. Lower-diameter projects are manufactured in HDPE, a high-resistance type of plastic that replaced the old ceramic piping—still present in smaller cities—and also is currently replacing some pieces of PVC, highly used by sanitation companies.

OSCILLATIONS

Pioneer of using this technology in Brazil, Silcon started in the industry in 1992 and is following since then the market ups and downs, starting with a strong reduction in the 2000s, reaching a tremendous increase in the competition between 2008 and 2012 and going to a real collapse in the last years. “The crisis of the 2000s was justified: most of the investment in infrastructure was carried out just in the beginning. At the end of this process we had a very strong retraction”, remembers him. “And this was expected in a certain way. But for this crisis we are going through, there was no prediction of such severity.”

These are the moments, however, when the capacity of resilience of the Brazilian market becomes clear. Familiarized with the severe economic cycles, the companies learned—after hard battles—to reinvent themselves in adverse situations. This is what Vermeer did, diversifying its product portfolio. For Flavio Leite, general manager from the American manufacturer, it was just this variety that allowed the company to keep in a healthy level their operations in the country. “The market has heated too much at the end of the 2010s, continuing through the three next years”, says him. “This brought many people in the area, attracted by the perspective of a very profitable business. Small businessmen bought two or three drilling machines and went to work in the industry. But then the market started to shrink quickly and only those companies that had enough resistance survived.”

Following this line, many of the small companies mentioned by Leite bankrupted. This leaded to a “feeling that the market had already a strong reduction”. “Many people went out, mainly the smaller companies that had no breath to resist to the crisis”, agrees him.