Rescue in the right direction
Directional drilling success takes meticulous planning and attention to detail. With unplanned and unseen underground obstacles conspiring to thwart even the best drilling plans, there is always plenty riding on the outcome, including reputations, and potentially millions of dollars to be made or lost. But what if lives, not money, were riding on the outcome? If standing on the sidelines were not disappointed geologists, engineers, and drilling crews but families desperate for news of miners trapped kilometres underground. And what if, when you broke through to an area confident of finding those trapped miners, you found only rubble? The San Jose copper and gold mine in Chile is 800km north of Santiago, in the Atacama Desert which sits between the...