COVER STORY A Passion for Sonic Rig Maker Working to Grow in North American Market By Brock Yordy he National Ground Water Association’s annual Groundwater Week conference, held in December in Las Vegas, allows every attendee to visit and learn from peers in the drilling industry. This year, I found myself at a dinner with drillers from the U.K., Israel, South Africa, Canada and all over the United States. Every guest at the dinner had the same passion: sonic drilling. These drillers utilized sonic to install monitoring wells, retrieve samples, install geothermal loops and in industrial drilling. After all the years I have attended NGWA, I found myself in an uncharted drilling community of drillers from all around the world. I had to seek out the team that brought drillers together from multiple continents. That team was the Eijkelkamp family of companies. After the event, I interviewed Huug Eijkelkamp, co-owner and CEO of Royal Eijkelkamp, and Troy Chipps, CEO of Eijkelkamp North America. We spoke about where they come from, where they are headed and how they created their culture for the drilling industry. Our interview here is edited for space and clarity. Q. Eijkelkamp is over 100 years old. Tell us about your history. Huug Eijkelkamp. My great-grandfather started the business in 1911 as a civil blacksmith after the First World War. Then my grandfather, Jan, continued the family business as a civil blacksmith, but he expanded his craftsmanship with T a shop that had everything you could imagine. He did the first gas plumbing in the Netherlands to maintenance in brick factories; he did all types of work. In the late 1950s, he was asked by Prof. Kees Edelman [a renowned soil scientist of the mid-20th century] to make hand augers. Our hand augers today are called Edelman. They used these augers to do geological mapping of the Netherlands. The funny fact is the first hand augers were only 5 feet long so they could fit into the cab of a Volkswagen Beetle. That was the car of choice for a geologist to travel the Netherlands to do the geological mapping. The Edelman augers were Eijkelkamp’s entry into geotechnical drilling equipment. Then in the late 1960s, my father, Fons, after finishing his service in the military, took over the family business. My father told my granddad, “I see a bright future in geotechnical soil and water research equipment.” So he focused the company on the geotechnical industry and, by the late 1970s, we built our first manufacturing factory. Q. There are many drilling methods out there. How did Eijkelkamp find sonic and start building sonic rigs? H.E. During the lousy oil recession that started in the 1980s, Royal Dutch Shell came to see my father and asked him to find a better drilling method for seismic drilling. At that time, we were already using percus-sion and mud rotary for seismic. Eijkelkamp did a worldwide survey for 12 NATIONAL DRILLER | FEBRUARY 2020 | NATIONALDRILLER.COM
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