Digging a tunnel from both ends and meeting in the middle is one of the oldest tricks in heavy construction. The Channel Tunnel crews shook hands through the rock in 1990, and most long rail and highway tunnels since have pulled off some version of that moment. Those crews had an advantage you don’t think about until it’s gone: a tunnel is big enough to put surveyors and laser guidance inside while you dig.<\/p>\n
A pipeline bore isn’t. It’s a mud-filled hole a couple of feet across with nothing inside but the drill string. So when an Alberta contractor set out to drill under the Athabasca River from both banks at once, the two bits had to find each other blind, nearly 1,000 feet down.<\/p>\n
They did.<\/p>\n
The Crossing Group, which has been steering holes for close to three decades, finished a 9,695-foot bore under the river south of Fort McMurray over the 2025-26 winter, and a 12-inch steel pipeline went in through it. Trenchless Technology<\/a> published the full account on May 14, written by the company’s own president, Jesse Funnell, and project engineer Cainan Trovato. So the on-budget, ahead-of-schedule framing is the contractor’s, not an outside auditor’s, and the piece reads like a highlight reel in places, as these things tend to. Still, the physical numbers are specific enough to check against each other, and they hold up.<\/p>\n It’s the longest hole the company has ever drilled. It isn’t a world record, though. Longer bores exist elsewhere, and this particular river has hosted a headline crossing already. We’ll get to that.<\/p>\n The normal way to steer one of these bores is electromagnetic. Crews lay wire coil out on the surface, run current through it, and a sensor behind the bit reads the field to work out where it is. That’s the same family of guidance that recently threaded a power line under a live London railway<\/a> without stopping the trams. The limit is physical: it only works as far as you can actually lay coil on the ground. On this job the terrain allowed 2,165 feet of coverage from the entry side and 1,345 feet from the exit, so roughly two-thirds of the bore had no coil over it at all.<\/p>\n That gap belonged to the gyroscopes. A gyro steering tool tracks its heading the way an airliner’s inertial navigation does, by measuring its own rotation, with no outside signal needed. The problem there is drift. Tiny errors pile up with distance, and after the better part of a mile, “we think we’re here” isn’t good enough to line up two 12-inch pilot holes nose to nose.<\/p>\n So for the endgame, the crews switched to passive magnetic ranging, which lets one drill string sense the other’s position directly instead of estimating its own. The two bores overlapped for 262 feet while the instruments confirmed both were tracking on paths that would actually join, and the meeting point sat 5,085 feet from the entry side, about 985 feet below the rigs. That 5,085-foot run from a single side is a company record on its own, and arguably the more impressive number of the two. All the steering was done by The Crossing Group’s own people, a point the company makes loudly, since long intersects usually bring in third-party specialists.<\/p>\n The hardware split the river unevenly. A rig rated for 1 million pounds of pull sat on the entry side, an American Augers 625 ran the exit, and both chewed through the same mix of clay shale, dolomite, limestone and lenses of oil sand with tungsten carbide tooling. The pilot holes went out at about 12 inches, and a reaming pass then opened the bore to 24 inches so the pipe had room to move. If bending steel through rock sounds like an oil-patch skill, that’s because it is. The same toolbox is drilling geothermal wells through 460-degree rock in Utah<\/a> and rehearsing nuclear waste boreholes under a Texas pasture<\/a>.<\/p>\n The site sits in muskeg, the spongy peat bog that covers much of northern Alberta. You can’t drive heavy equipment across it for most of the year, because it only carries weight when it’s frozen. So the whole program had to fit inside a December-to-March window, with ice bridges for access and about 80 minutes of travel just to reach the entry side.<\/p>\n The crews lost roughly a week early on to access problems and clawed it back by running around the clock, Christmas included, with a camp on the entry side so nobody had to commute. Temperatures hit 40 below more than once (that’s the one spot where Fahrenheit and Celsius agree, and it’s a miserable place to agree), and boilers ran on both banks to keep the equipment and the drilling fluid from freezing solid.<\/p>\n One decision made the schedule work before a single foot of pilot hole was drilled, and frankly it’s the move I’d steal. The steel casings at both ends, 36 and 42 inches across, had been hammered into place a full winter earlier, then capped and left waiting for the drilling crews to come back. That’s a season of work taken off the clock in advance.<\/p>\n If the Athabasca sounds familiar, there’s a reason. In 2015, Michels<\/a> drilled 7,200 feet under the same river north of Fort McMurray and pulled 42-inch pipe through, which the company called the longest 42-inch HDD installation in North America, using two 1.2-million-pound rigs and the same two-ended intersect method.<\/p>\n The new bore runs 9,695 feet against that 7,200, but it carries 12-inch pipe against 42, so the two jobs aren’t chasing the same title. The 2015 crew’s fight was moving that much heavy pipe; this one’s was distance and blind navigation. Both went under the river rather than through it, and TC Energy spelled out why after the 2015 crossing: the Athabasca is a protected area, and drilling beneath it kept the work out of the water entirely.<\/p>\n So what actually flows through a 12-inch line that justified all this? Natural gas liquids. The crossing is a segment of the Whiskey Jack Lateral, a pipeline corridor Wolf Midstream<\/a> is building as part of its NGL North system in northeastern Alberta. NGL is the ethane, propane, butane and condensate stripped out of natural gas before the gas gets burned. The propane in your grill tank started life exactly this way. Those liquids are worth more sold separately than sent through a flame, so Wolf recovers them near the oil sands and pipes them to a separation plant, on a transportation network the company puts at about 280 miles.<\/p>\nSo how do two drill bits find each other in the rock?<\/h2>\n
Everything had to happen on frozen ground<\/h2>\n
This river has hosted a record before<\/h2>\n
The pipe is for the liquids in the gas<\/h2>\n