What keeps Josi Morgenroth, Ph.D., P.Eng., a senior geotechnical engineer at BGC awake at night? It’s not unease about future disaster.
She trusts her colleagues and the cautious, proven methods that have kept the underground industry safe for decades. Instead, it’s excitement for the incredible potential of the present. According to Morgenroth, we’re entering an era where the hands-on “boots on the ground” tradition is coming together with new technology and data, giving the industry a chance to move forward with greater confidence.
“I think we are living in a really exciting time where there’s this opportunity to leverage data and technology better than ever before,” Morgenroth said. “Especially with this influx of new engineers into our field who are all tech native, that code, that have this thirst for figuring stuff out.… We have the tools to do it, so why not?”
Together with her colleague Jeremy Groves, M.A.Sc., P.Eng., also a senior geotechnical engineer at BGC, the team at BGC is helping accelerate the adoption of new technology across their work. One of BGC’s newest tools, inDepth, reveals what’s happening below ground by turning millions of real-time drilling data points into a clearer picture of the subsurface.
The burden of uncertainty
Geotechnical risk is the primary bottleneck for Canadian civil infrastructure. Whether it is a pipeline traversing a remote a river valley or a tunnelling project spanning an urban environment, the ground is a realm of inherent unknowns.
“The risk that comes from anything geotech-related is from uncertainty,” Morgenroth said. “We’re often dealing with really large projects that cover large expanses or potentially are quite deep … and characterizing the subsurface is always a big question mark. No matter how much investigation you do, you can’t 100 per cent know what the ground is going to give until you start construction.”
So, the big question in any type of civil infrastructure project is: who carries that risk and how much uncertainty is there? For projects like horizontal directional drilling (HDD) or tunnelling, this uncertainty is even greater. Groves points out that projects often have to make major financial and engineering decisions based on just a few vertical boreholes, which only sample a tiny part of the whole area.
“You collect data points along that piece of linear of infrastructure, but there’s a lot of it that remains unknown, and the geologic systems at play are really complex in terms of what has been laid down there for soil and rock conditions,” he said.
The financial stakes of this uncertainty are staggering. While conventional methods for pipeline construction projects like open-cut trenchintypically carry a five to 10 per cent contingency for time and budget, the world of HDD tells a different story. Studies cited by Groves indicate that HDD projects, such as installing pipelines or electrical transmission cables under rivers and highways, face an average 40 per cent increase in time due to risk events. In severe cases, projects even fail to be completed.
“Construction is where the major cost implications are really faced,” Groves said. “You’ve mobilized to a site, there are many pieces of big equipment building, construction or drilling starts, and then you encounter something unforeseen or unplanned for. That’s when the costs can really start to escalate with delays.”
“You can quantify the uncertainty that you are aware of, but you can never quantify the uncertainty that you are not aware of,” added Morgenroth.
Groves says HDD projects, which can cover complex geologic systems over large areas, often have only two or three vertical drill holes to support geotechnical planning and design. “So you might be limited with the information available for the geotechnical at the start of the project, relative to the distances that these projects cover,” he said. “Construction practice and contracts just do not address the significance of that risk. So what this shows is that the industry would benefit from a more structured way to handle this elevated risk.”
A digital “lens” for the subsurface
To address this critical juncture, Groves and his colleagues at BGC, with decades’ worth of drilling project experience, have developed inDepth, a new software that leverages data collected on these projects.
“For drilling projects like HDD, we take the data that is being collected and process it in a way that helps us better understand what’s going on across these projects, so that when issues arise, we can identify the issue and help implement the right risk mitigation faster. It also helps us improve strategies with planning and design on the next projects,” said Groves.
For more than a decade, BGC has been involved in various research consortia with academia and industry partners. For the past two and a half years, the BGC team has been working on a software that ingests real-time drilling data – data that rigs today often collect, but which largely remains underutilized. inDepth has been deployed on more than 15 different projects.
“This data that we’re collecting, things like torque and thrust and rotations per minute, is already being collected on these jobs, but it’s underutilized. So for our clients to now have a way to transform these millions of data points into practical insights, it’s fantastic,” said Groves.
BGC provides forensic evidence rather than the gut checks that have historically dominated the field. Morgenroth says that traditional practice often relies on anecdotal evidence, such as an inspector noticing a change in mud colour. “To take that information and make a decision with that is really difficult … and is, in the end, more of a guess than it is like actual data,” she said. “Using our platform, you actually capture real data, and you can actually pinpoint not only time but also causes of delays.”
Right now, data often isn’t collected at all – or if it is, it isn’t used. When contractors encounter unexpected ground conditions, the only clues might come from the on-site inspector or the driller. But inDepth changes that.
“We can help diagnose the issue. Where did it start, and why did it start? We’ll pull in all of the design on the job data and then bring it back to the table for the decision-makers to make informed decisions about what to do about this issue. What we often find is that people who have to make these decisions don’t always have all the information because it’s too hard to process and handle this data,” Groves added.
Morgenroth calls the tool a “plotting function on steroids.” On most jobsites, raw drilling data is a tangled mess. inDepth cleans it up and makes it usable, but that doesn’t mean just anyone can use the tool or interpret the results. “Our tool doesn’t allow you necessarily to remove the geotechnical judgement from the process,” Morgenroth said. “You still need to have the relevant background.”
Case study: Navigating buried geologic valleys
Groves gives an example of every engineer’s nightmare: a drill suddenly breaking through solid bedrock into an unexpected, buried valley full of loose sand and gravel. This causes high torque and can even lead to the borehole collapsing.
With inDepth, the team identifies the changes in drilling conditions the moment they occur. “It’s the ability to identify that the changes in the drilling parameters correlates to an actual change in the geologic system, which in turn, allows us to to help implement suitable mitigration solutions,” Groves said. This allows the project to adjust the approach to fit the changed conditions and avoid major delays.
The piling frontier
While inDepth was developed for horizontal drilling, its portability is currently being explored in the vertical piling sector. “We’ve been able to show the value that our tool brings to drilling projects, both in HDD and geotechnical investigative drilling applications. But our approach with inDepth is also portable into other areas like piling and tunnelling construction.” said Morgenroth.
In northern British Columbia, BGC will be deploying the tool on a project involving 250 drilled pile installations designed to stabilize a landslide. The challenge is ensuring each pile reaches a specified embedment depth into a stable underlying geologic layer.
“The intent is that through a combination of being on site to physically inspect the a sample of the initial piles being installed, we plan to calibrate the embedment depths … to the [measurement-while-drilling] data that is going to be collected throughout the pile installations,” Groves said.
After that, the data will be used to verify the remaining pile installations, with the potential for saving significant time and cost by optimizing the embedment depths and preventing over-drilling. “The time and material savings for the client by not over-drilling all of these piles is really significant for them,” Groves added.
Morgenroth and Groves are clear that geotechnical risks can seldom be fully understood and need to be carefully managed. Morgenroth cites a mantra that has stuck with her since the start of her career: “You will pay for geotechnical uncertainty either at the start of the project or at the end of the project, and if you pay for it at the end, it’ll be more expensive.”
The success of inDepth signals a broader shift in the industry. As a new generation of digitally fluent engineers enters the workforce, the development and adoption of these tools is expected to accelerate. For Morgenroth and Groves, the excitement comes from the fact that the industry no longer has to accept the risk of the unknown. “This tool illustrates how new technologies can help accelerate further improvements in managing underground project risk in our industries,” Morgenroth said.
With inDepth, BGC Engineering is making sure that when the ground changes, engineers are one step ahead.