Steady growth through many smaller jobs built Southeast Connections into what it is today. There was one notable large job, however, that turned into somewhat of a signature project that redefined the company’s status in the industry. About six years ago, the business was hired to install a 12-inch-diameter, 14-mile-long natural gas transmission pipeline near Charleston, South Carolina.
The project included 14 HDD bores through environmentally sensitive wetlands. The bores ranged in length from 1,000 to 6,100 feet and between 20 and 60 feet deep to pass under wetlands, streams and the like.
“One of the customer’s main concerns was that we pay extremely close attention to the environmentally sensitive nature of those water crossings and be sure there were no inadvertent releases of drilling fluids,” says Doug Simmons, general manager of the HDD division at Southeast. “It was paramount to the customer that we avoid them. So we used geotech investigations to find soil types that offered better stability, which would allow us to maintain higher downhole pressures.”
To avoid inadvertent releases, operators had to constantly monitor the downhole pressures of fluids in the borehole itself. If they saw the pressure climb or spike past what a drilling plan called for, crews had to take action quickly to reduce it.
“The project also required the presence of a drilling-fluids engineer to monitor the fluid properties, evaluate soils changes and engineer a drilling fluid that gave us the best chance of success at minimizing that downhole pressure,” Simmons says.
The job also included more than 6 1/2 miles of opencut pipeline installation. Equipment used included four HDD rigs (made by American Augers, Vermeer and Ditch Witch); up to a dozen Mud Dog and GapVax hydroexcavation trucks; and anywhere from 100 to 150 employees, depending on what stage the project was in, he says.
It took about eight months to complete the project.
“There were definitely a lot of moving parts,” Simmons says.
Read more about Southeast Connections in the September 2025 issue of Cleaner magazine.
