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Selecting The Right Location For Well Drilling - USA
TEM CASE STUDY ● KANSAS, UNITED STATES
01 – The challenge
For nearly 30 years, Curtis Weninger’s core challenge hasn’t changed – selecting the right drill site before the bit ever touches ground. Get it wrong, and a client ends up with a poorly performing well, or worse, a dry one.
Curtis runs East Wichita Well & Pump Service, drilling residential, commercial, irrigation, livestock, and geothermal wells across Sedgwick County, Kansas – a family business his father Don started in the early 1970s. Rather than relying on experience and local knowledge alone, Curtis invested in TEMcompany’s tTEM towed geophysical scanner, bringing subsurface electromagnetic survey capability directly into his own workflow.
02 – The context
A training and test survey for East Wichita Well & Pump Service, bringing in-house tTEM survey capability into an established, family-run well-drilling business in Sedgwick County, Kansas.
PARTNER
East Wichita Well & Pump Service, LLC
COUNTRY
United States – Kansas (Sedgwick County)
TERRAIN
Sedimentary formations, saturated subsurface layers
SURVEY LENGTH
16 lines, 5.7 km
TECHNOLOGY
tTEM
YEAR
2020
Training and equipment support provided directly by TEMcompany, equipping East Wichita Well & Pump Service with in-house tTEM survey capability.
03 – The solution
Ground-based Electromagnetic Survey
Training covered the full workflow – assembly, measurement, processing, and inversion, with a focus on producing client-facing outputs Curtis could use directly: resistivity models exported as KMZ files, ready to overlay in Google Earth Pro alongside a property’s real geographic context.
Methodology
01
Equipment Training
Curtis’s team trained on the complete tTEM workflow, from physical assembly through data processing and inversion.
02
tTEM Acquisition
On 27 May, the team ran a test survey at a training site in Maize, Kansas, covering 16 lines and 5.7 kilometres.
03
Data Processing
Over 5,000 individual soundings, collected in roughly an hour, were processed using TEMimage software.
04
Client Facing Output
Resistivity sections were exported as KMZ files, allowing results to be reviewed directly in Google Earth Pro, overlaid on the survey site’s real geography.
04 – The results
The resulting models showed clear subsurface layering across the site – a shallow resistive unit near the surface, transitioning to progressively more conductive material at depth, consistent with saturated sedimentary formations. Lateral variation was clearly resolved across the survey lines, identifying exactly where the geology changes across the property – detail no single test hole could reveal.
5.7Km
Surveyed across 16 lines
5000+
Individual soundings collected
~1hour
Time to collect the full test survey
Reading the data
01
Reading the layers
The shallow resistive zone near the surface and the conductive material below it mark the boundary between dry ground and saturated sediment — the detail a driller needs before choosing a depth.
02
Depth & Location
The survey showed how the geology changed both with depth and across the property. Lateral variation across the 16 lines revealed shifts a single borehole wouldn’t show.
03
5000+ Soundings, One Hour
A stationary sounding gives one data point at a time. This survey collected over 5,000 measurements across 5.7 km in roughly an hour.
04
From data to field use
The resistivity sections were exported as KMZ files and opened in Google Earth Pro, so Curtis could reference the results directly on site.
05 The impact
A veteran drilling business, with a new way to see underground.
With almost 30 years of hands-on drilling experience already behind him, Curtis now pairs that expertise with subsurface data he can generate himself — turning “where should we drill” from a judgment call into a question backed by real resistivity data, before the bit ever goes into the ground.
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