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A Sudanese villager’s eyes lit up when he saw
the lightweight rig brought in November by Peter
Ball of Eureka UK Ltd. It promised the end of
laborious, manual drilling for water in the bed of
the Atbara river, each hole taking weeks.
The
new rig drilled four holes in a fortnight, for
drinking water, and the village of Dabbura
celebrated with a feast. When all 50 communities
along the Atbara have boreholes, the rig will be
used for irrigation water, also.
Since the building of a dam upstream in 1964,
the river runs dry for half the year. Villagers
rely on manual drilling for irrigation water. For
drinking they dig wells, which can run dry or be
polluted with salt. Peter Ball was brought in by
Hunting Technical Services, managers of a UN
Development Programme project to help the
villagers. The Eureka rig can dig deeper and its
boreholes can be sealed against salty water.
Many people have bright ideas for equipment
suited to developing countries. Ball is one of the
few to turn such an idea into a viable
business.
His easy-to-use drilling rigs are now operated
by Oxfam in Ethiopia, by Oxfam, Care International,
the UN Development Programme and an Irish
agency Concern in Cambodia, and by the New
Britain Palm Oil Development Co. in Papua New
Guinea. This is in addition to over 30 rigs sold in
his initial market, Nigeria.
Mrs Ball keeps the books, and Eureka has been
financed with an overdraft secured on their home.
The drills are built by a small Sussex engineering
firm. Peter Ball prides himself not only on
delivering drills but on training people to use
them.
He says that for New Britain his team drilled
eight boreholes in two weeks to supply water people
working on the oil palm estate. Drilling and
equipment cost £3,000 per well, including the
cost of buying the drill. Previously wells had cost
£6,000. The company is to drill further holes
to provide water in neighbouring villages.
Ball has been involved in drilling since 1972
when, after an engineering apprenticeship, he went
to Ethiopia with a team from Tear Fund. The drill
bit got stuck in soft ground down the first hole,
but in the harder rock of Tigray, they provided
water for about 25 villages.
In the early 1980s he won for Hydreq of
Littlehampton a contract for water for 44 villages
in Kano state, Nigeria. The project took a long
time and required three years to negotiate. Ball
believed he could speed things up if he could get
appropriate equipment into African hands.
He left Hydreq and spent six months designing
his own rig. This initial design, with associated
equipment, costs £18,000, half the price of
conventional gear.
But the big saving, he says, is in management
time, operator-training and workshop back up. A
crew can go off into the bush with a Eureka rig on
a trailer towed by a Land Rover.
The rig is mechanical, not hydraulic, which
makes it easier for operators inexperienced
handling equipment. A Honda engine rotates the
drill: the operators apply the downward force.
With a recommendation from Robin Temple-Hazell
who has spent a lifetime prospecting for water in
Nigeria, Ball got an order for his first rig from a
World Bank-funded farm project in Bauchi state. The
Nigerians wanted to see a videotape of the rig
before they would pay the air freight. But it
worked well and brought more orders from Nigeria
though none from elsewhere. Consultants are
conservative. Tenderers often want two competing
quotes and Eureka had no direct competitor.
Ball was disappointed that most of his Nigerian
rigs were used for irrigation rather than drinking
water. Village water supplies are commonly provided
by outside contractors who come and go. Ball argues
that villages really need a rig to keep on
drilling. One borehole with handpump can supply
only 120 people.
He found it hard to interest aid agencies until
Oxfam approached him. It had found a light rig
built in Thailand more adaptable and less expensive
in Cambodia than a conventional rig mounted on a
lorry, which was heavy for precarious timber
bridges and much more powerful than the soft ground
required.
Ball’s initial rig can drill an eight-inch hole
60 metres deep. Oxfam asked him to design a lighter
six-inch, 30-metre version which could be used not
just in Cambodia but elsewhere.
He designed his Port-A-Rig which sells for only
£7,000-£8,000 with equipment and has
proved popular for drinking water. It has a mast
capable of handling drill pipe up to a weight of
500 kg (Cambodia required only 200 kg). It can be
assembled from the back of a pickup truck in only
15 minutes. It was a Port-A-Rig he took to the
Sudan.
He comments: “Reducing the weight and complexity
of basic drilling equipment and ensuring it is
supported with appropriate drilling tools and
well-lining materials simplifies an awe-inspiring
display of technology to an understandable
operation that can compete with the cost of digging
wells by hand.
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