CLEAN AS MUD

摘要

It may sound like an oxymoron, but the concept of "clean mud" is at the foundation of MudPuppy Inc.'s successful three-decades-old business. The company's primary customers are water well drilling contractors, who must create a wall cake out of a mud mixture to keep the hole of a well open during drilling. Dirty mud not only weakens that wall cake, risking a cave-in, but also damages expensive drill rigs, shortening their life. MudPuppy Inc.'s mud-cleaning systems solve these problems by removing rocks, sand and debris from mud with a single piece of equipment. That's a big change from the traditional process, which requires hauling multiple machines to a site, digging a large pit, filling it with water and mud, and removing it all when the job is done. "You just bring your drill rig and MudPuppy to a site, and you're rocking and rolling," says Craig Henderson, owner of MudPuppy Inc. "That saves on manpower, overhead, jobsite set-up time - it can pay for itself on a single job." The company manufactures six MudPuppies today, all powered by Cat industrial engines, with applications extending to geothermal drilling, mining, slurry wall construction and more. MP255-100 and MP255-400 models, with higher-horsepower C7.1 U.S. EPA Tier 4 Final engines, also include a mud pump for even greater drill rig protection. "We put the mud pump where it should be - with the mud-cleaning system. Our equipment takes the beating, so our customers' drill rigs last longer, and they save money," Henderson says.