Drilling Engineers, Inc.

Drilling Engineers was founded in 1965, just two short years after the Central Mine Equipment Company of Missouri rolled the first of the now-industry-standard CME-55s off its assembly lines. The drilling industry has changed a lot since then, and Drilling Engineers has matched every advance in technology with another year of experience.

Since its inception, Drilling Engineers has focused itself on training its field crews, then keeping those same crew members in the fold. Clients can trust this experience to get their project done when a Drilling Engineers field crew rolls onto a new job site.

Modern contaminant hydrology has brought us to the realization that decisions regarding management of subsurface contamination need to be based on an understanding of all contaminant phases (i.e., aqueous, non-aqueous-liquid, sorbed, and vapor) and the biogeochemical conditions in which the contaminants are present. The practical approach for collection and analysis of frozen-cores presented here represents an important new tool for improving that understanding. Uniquely, core samples frozen in situ before recovery can preserve pore fluids, volatile compounds, dissolved gases, redox conditions, mineralogy, microbial ecology, and pore structure. Furthermore, in situ freezing improves quality of recovered core by preventing materials from dropping out of sample liners during recovery to ground surface. Collectively, steps followed for collecting frozen cores are referred to here as cryogenic core collection (C3).

Because freezing provides effective field preservation, frozen cores can be processed efficiently under controlled laboratory conditions to resolve a broad spectrum of chemical, physical and biological characteristics. Critically, processing core in the laboratory simplifies field work and improves the resources (e.g., anaerobic chambers) that can be utilized in preparation of samples for analysis. Furthermore, laboratory processing frozen cores allows “production line” processing and analysis of large quantities of samples, referred to here as high-throughput core analysis.