/EXPLORATION & MINING GEOLOGY
Drilling on top of Afghanistan’s roof
by Ibrahim Jafari, President & CEO at Afghanite Company
Afghanite Company (Afghanite) is the leading engineering service provider for the mining and infrastructure projects of Afghanistan. Its name comes from the mineral discovered for the first time in 1968 in the Badakhshan Lapis mines in Afghanistan. With many monumental track records, it has a very adventurous and exciting experience of working in a country which at first sight seems not that easy to operate in. 48
Afghanite has accomplished the largest ever topographical survey of Afghanistan using aerial LIDAR and photogrammetry techniques for a transboundary gas pipeline named Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline. The surveyed area was a project corridor with a length of 815 km (≈ 506.41 mi) and a width of about 2 km (≈ 1.24 mi). In 2018, Afghanite accomplished the two largest geotechnical investigation projects of the country as well. The first one was the Geotech investigation of the same pipeline route (the TAPI gas pipeline) with thousands of meters of soil and rock drilling, around a thousand trail pits excavations, and another thousand geophysical field tests in addition to those needed on the collected soil, rock and water samples. The other was a geotechnical investigation for a new tunnel in Central Afghanistan (Salang Pass) over the period 2018-2019. Nine boreholes with a depth around 220 m (722 ft) each had to be drilled on top of three pre-selected locations, as the candidate alignments needed to have more conducted investigations for the selection of the final option. Logistics were the most challenging part of the project. Almost all the drilling points had no ground access, and all of the major items had to be transported by a suitable helicopter. The heli-support for the drilling points was not easy. Coring Magazine #17
