Directional Drilling in Rifle, Colorado
Directional drilling and MWD for pad-based tight-gas programs in Garfield County and the Piceance Basin.
Geo Mag Technologies provides directional drilling services for operators working around Rifle, Colorado. Garfield County is the heart of the Piceance Basin, a tight-gas province on the Western Slope where wells have been drilled directionally from multi-well pads for two decades.
Geo Mag supplies the mud motors, MWD tool and complete bottom hole assembly needed to drill a deviated well and provides well planning and technical consulting. It mobilizes to western Colorado from Broussard, Louisiana; travel distance is not a limiting factor.
- Region
- Piceance Basin
- County
- Garfield County, Colorado
- Coverage
- Available for projects anywhere in the United States
- Mobilizes from
- Broussard, Louisiana
- Availability
- 24 Hours
At a glance
Pad drilling in the Piceance Basin
The Piceance is a natural gas basin. Its main producing interval is the Williams Fork of the Mesaverde group, a thick, tight sandstone sequence that operators have developed with many wells per pad, each directionally drilled to its own bottom-hole location. Pads with twenty or more directional wells have been approved in Garfield County, and horizontal Mancos and Niobrara wells have been drilled beneath the Mesaverde as well.
The terrain adds to the case for directional work: the Colorado River valley, the Roan Plateau and steep side canyons limit where a pad can go, so trajectories are designed to reach spaced bottom-hole targets from the few practical surface sites.
SourceRegional geology and development patterns are general public information about the basin, not Geo Mag claims. Geo Mag statements and manufacturer figures are attributed on the Technology page.
Geo Mag capabilities for Rifle-area pads
Pad programs with many directional wells are as much a planning exercise as a drilling one. Geo Mag provides pre-drill trajectory design that accounts for the target and offset wells, then drills with Bico and Tomahawk mud motors, RSS, Key Drill drilling systems and complete BHA packages.
Company-owned positive-pulse MWD tools deliver survey and tool-face data through the KeyDrill KDU-Mini decoder, and Polaris logs the well with WITS delivery to the rig and WITSML delivery to the operator. Gamma and wave propagation resistivity are available in the same string when a horizontal target calls for them.
Drilling systems: Bico and Tomahawk mud motors / RSS / Key Drill drilling systems / Complete bottom hole assembly (BHA) packages.
Full directional drilling serviceAll systems and specifications
Systems relevant to this region
Positive-pulse MWD tool
Directional, gamma and resistivity configurations
The MWD tool is the instrument that tells the directional driller where the bit is and where it is heading. Survey and tool-face data come up the mud column as pressure pulses, so the trajectory can be corrected while drilling instead of after a trip.
KeyDrill KDU-Mini decoding unit
Mud-pulse decoding at the rig floor
Every survey depends on the surface receiver separating a small pressure pulse from pump noise. Deeper wells and PDC bits distort the signal; the lower the pulse a decoder can resolve, the more of the well it can survey reliably.
Polaris RDS logging system
Gamma and directional data logging with remote monitoring
The logging system is where surveys, gamma and drilling parameters become the well record: plots, LAS files and reports the operator keeps, and a live feed the office can watch without being on location.
SourceSystem roles from the Technology page; Geo Mag statements and manufacturer specifications are attributed there.
Areas served around Rifle
Geo Mag is available for directional drilling projects across the Piceance Basin and the Western Slope, including work staged from:
- Parachute
- Silt
- New Castle
- De Beque
- Meeker
- Grand Junction
- Rangely
- Mesa County
- Rio Blanco County
Nearby service areas
SourceCoverage statement from the Geo Mag questionnaire: available anywhere in the United States; travel distance is not a limiting factor. Places listed are areas Geo Mag is available to work in, not offices or completed projects.
Directional drilling questions for Rifle
Yes. Western Colorado is within Geo Mag's nationwide coverage. Tools and personnel mobilize from Broussard, Louisiana.
Discuss a Rifle drilling project.
Call or text (337) 278-4607, 24 hours. Or send a message through the contact form.