About

Southern Tablelands Drilling director Roger Ritchie has been engaged in the drilling industry since 1975. During this time Roger has undertaken a vast array of drilling operations, including but not limited to:

  • Running a program for Ingersoll Rand to educate Antarctic-bound Drillers.
  • Drilling permanent anchor holes for Mooney Mooney Bridge on the Sydney-Newcastle expressway, Bathust Bridge and Wingham Bridge (Manning River).
  • Reverse circulation in mud rotary in large diameter holes up to 630mm for the University of NSW, Moore Park Trust, Westfield Pagewood, and Randwick Army Barracks.
  • Carrying out seismic projects for Velseis, in conjunction with Kembla Coal & Coke and BHP.
  • Core and exploration drilling for Austin & Butta at Yellow Rock Colliery and core drilling projects for Shell Billetin at Cooma, RTA, Transfield, Bowral Bricks, Nowra Bricks, Somerset Mining and Rocla.
  • Relining large irrigation bores and town water supply bores in the Riverina area with stainless steel liners using a unique expansion system to expand stainless steel casing once in place to the sides of the original rusted steel casing, thus maintaining the original diameter of the hole which in turn allowed for the continued use of the original pumps.
  • Drilling water monitoring and exploration holes for Metropolitan Coal and Gujarat NRE Coking Coal. In places these holes reached depths of up to 450 meters, all of which were carried out successfully.
  • Drilling pilot holes and installing probes in hot coal for Coalpac in Lithgow. These holes were drilled 20-30 metres into the smouldering coal heap (up to 480 degrees), with the probes successfully returning data as required by the client.
  • Drilling pilot holes and earth strap holes for the refitting of concrete power poles for Sovereign Energy in Nowra.
  • Countless water bores across regional NSW.
  • Successfully cored a geothermal test hole to 530 meters at Appin.

Roger currently holds a class 4 drillers licence.

Our team

All members of our drilling team are long term employess and are Australian Drilling Industry Training Committee (ADITC) trained and certified. Our team also includes a class 1 Boilermaker and a Plant Mechanic, also long term employees, who operate in and out of our workshop facility.