Benefit from 300 years of drilling experience

Holland Drilling is the specialist in the installation and removal of trenchless crossings in underground infrastructure. The company was founded five years ago after the merger of two existing specialists and has since undergone an enormous efficiency drive. The machinery has been completely modernized and significantly expanded with the latest techniques and methods of (directional) drilling. "As we are now organized, we have more than 300 years of drilling experience in both engineering and execution," says Ronald van Krieken, director of Holland Drilling enthusiastically. "That's pretty special considering today's market conditions."

"Surely flexibility and striving for a high degree of safety and quality are our main objectives," Van Krieken continued. "We have an extensive engineering department to fully design the borings we perform ourselves. In addition, we regularly produce designs of drillings that are performed by third parties. Basically, we operate in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, and occasionally we make trips to other countries. For example, we have carried out drilling in the south of France and even in Cyprus."

Unique machines

Holland Drilling masters several techniques to make underground drilling. "In the field of horizontal directional drilling, we make HDD drillings in the range from 2.5 to 150 tons," says Van Krieken. "For the latter category, we recently invested in a unique compact rig. This gives us the most compact 150-ton drill rig on the Dutch market. After all, space is becoming increasingly scarce in our densely populated country, so the more compact the equipment the better we are able to drill a well. With our compact HDD machines we make drillings from 25 meters drill length to sometimes more than a kilometer. We are also specialized in pilot-driven auger drilling. We can drill in diameters from 110 millimeters to as much as 1.70 meters with machines from 40 tons of pressing force to as much as 320 tons of pressing force. This technique is widely used to make underground crossings with railroads. All of our employees engaged in auger drilling are therefore ProRail certified. As a company we are certified with Prorail for all resulting HDD- an Avegaar drilling." 

Own people and equipment

Directional drilling realized by Holland Drilling forms the basis for, among other things, the construction of medium or high voltage networks, telecom connections, drinking water transport pipelines or heat pipelines, but also for special applications such as tube stations or fauna passages (culverts). "Projects we always run with our own people and machines. Much of our equipment is developed, modified or adapted in-house in our own workshop. Here we also develop and produce related equipment," Van Krieken explains. "For example, we also recently developed a unique technique to remove existing bores that are an obstacle to new infrastructure projects. We have already removed several existing bores in close cooperation with ProRail, among others, so that planned construction work could go ahead without any problems. And so we try to relieve our clients in the field of trenchless techniques in every possible way."