About Us

History

Michael C. Batten is the president and founder of Batten Drilling, Inc. After several years of experience in the drilling industry, Michael began Batten Drilling in 1993 with one Texoma 270 drilling rig. He operated in the Huntsville, Texas area, and his business at that time consisted of residential foundation drilling. In 1994, he added a 600 drilling rig and crew and began drilling for commercial projects. Batten Drilling has since increased its fleet to 16 drilling machines and drills for residential, commercial, power, communication and industrial foundation projects.

 

About Us

In business for over 30 years, Batten Drilling is currently active in residential, commercial, power, communication and industrial foundation drilling. The company has extensive experience in drilled straight shafts and under reamed shafts including rock drilling, temporary casing and slurry displacement method where required because of water and soil conditions. Batten Drilling currently owns and operates 16 drilling machines: 3 for low clearance drilling (1 rubber tired and 2 track machines), and 13 regular drilling machines (9 rubber tired and 4 on tracks).

Batten Drilling will work with the construction supervisors in scheduling the appropriate size and number of rigs. Batten Drilling has all tooling necessary to efficiently complete a project. Among this tooling we have an inventory of large and small diameter pipe for upper and down hole casing needs. Should casing be required, Batten Drilling will mobilize specified steel pipe to the site. Procedure includes over sizing hole, setting temporary steel pipe to seal hole, cleaning out the shaft and pulling pipe as concrete is poured into hole.

When a project requires slurry drilling, Batten Drilling has (4) 120 barrel vacuum trucks, (1) 70 barrel vacuum truck (along with a mud cleaning system consisting of a 300 barrel shaker tank and a 500 barrel storage tank, to provide a turnkey slurry drilling operation. Procedure consists of the use of polymer or bentonite drilling fluid to create head pressure in a drilled shaft in order to excavate to the required depth with the least amount of caving. Once at desired depth, steel reinforcing and concrete form are set. A concrete pump truck will be dispatched to site at which time a sealed tremie of appropriate length for drilled shaft will be clamped to concrete pump truck. The tremie will be lowered to bottom of hole, and concrete will be pumped to grade while a trash pump pumps the slurry to a desanding tank to be cleaned and finally to the holding tank.

In addition to slurry experience on commercial jobs, Batten Drilling, Inc. has completed over 5000 cell tower sites with one to three shafts being required on each site. A large number of these shafts, ranging in sizes up to 108” X 65’, were processed by the slurry displacement method.

Batten Drilling has performed drilling auger cast piles for the last ten years.  Batten Drilling has a Schwing trailer pump, a GUH auger cast pile monitoring system, and augers of various diameters specifically for this type of drilling. Batten Drilling currently drills, supplies and places grout and rebar.