44 | Breaking new ground Mikey and Mike spotted the hole in the market before the establishment of Hard Core Drilling. Hard Core Drilling T T Hugh de Lacy CONTRACTING Proud to Support Hard Core Drilling Ltd Chartered Accountants Visit: www.tandemgroup.co.nz Taranaki's local ground investigation team • Geotechnical Drilling • CPT • SPT • Push Tubes • Monitoring wells • Piezometer Installations • Auger Drilling • Rotary Mud • Air Drilling www.hardcoredrilling.co.nz | 027 389 3051 | mikey@hardcoredrilling.co.nz Business has taken off for start-up Taranaki drilling company Hard Core Drilling Ltd since its founders bet on the advantage of being local in a region where the main opposition is outside companies that come in only at the cost of substantial mobilisation fees. Adding to their advantage of being locals in the Taranaki market, Hard Core Drilling founders Mikey Herdson and Mike Avey designed and built a four-wheel-drive drilling rig that can perform a range of conventional and specialised drilling functions, and can access drilling sites that few other rigs can. The two came together while working for another company where Mike Avey was Mikey Herdson’s drilling manager. They became partners in starting up Hard Core Drilling in 2019, though the company wasn’t fully operational until 2021. Mikey Herdson’s work for his earlier employer had taken him round the world, seismic-testing oil and gas sites in Turkiye, Estonia, Australia and Papua New Guinea, as well as New Zealand. Back home Mikey and Mike quickly spotted the hole in the market. “There was no one in New Plymouth doing the sort of drilling we set ourselves up to do: you had to bring in drilling rigs from out of town and they came with a massive mobilisation fee,” Mikey says. “What we’re trying to do is keep the money that would have been spent on mobilisation in the region. “There was a big gap in the market, so I sold my house and put everything into the business.” The core of the business is the Hino Dutro four-wheel-drive tipper truck into which Mikey and Mike incorporated all the best and most relevant design features they’d found from a combination of their wide experience and their extensive research. “There was no one in New Plymouth doing the sort of drilling we set ourselves up to do: you had to bring in drilling rigs from out of town and they came with a massive mobilisation fee.” Even before the paint was dry on the Hino – in some cases even before it was painted - it was successfully tested and deployed in the full range of functions now being offered by the company, from standard penetration testing (SPT) and cone penetration testing (CPT), to push tubes, well monitoring, Piezometer installation, and augur, rotary mud and air drilling. To further expand its range of functions, Hard Core Drilling is anticipating the arrival from Italy this year of a Pagani liquefaction testing unit. This measures the density of soils through an electronic probe pushed into the ground by the drilling rig. “It’s a fairly small unit with a 3.5m mast that can be folded up, and it will allow us to carry out tests in places other rigs can’t reach,” Mikey says. And while their purpose-built drilling rig is more than paying its way in the Taranaki market, there’s something on the horizon that will make it even busier. This is drilling closed loops for home heating, where a polythene pipe is driven typically 90m into the ground to access geo-thermal heat and bring it to the surface and a heat exchanger in the house, thereby providing free heating and cooling indefinitely. “There’s a lot of this closed-loop heating being installed around the world but very little of it in New Zealand, despite this being a very geothermally active country,” Mikey says. “In other countries it’s subsidised, and we’d like to see it subsidised in New Zealand because if you want clean green energy there’s a solution here to be had.”
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