About Us

Background

From the Gawler Craton of South Australia, where Titeline executed drill-outs of major deposits, including Prominent Hill, Carrapateena and Hillside, to today’s exploration hotspots, such as Ecuador in South America, the company’s unwavering commitment to safety, productivity and innovation has stood the test of time across variously demanding locations around the world. Titeline Drilling has been operating from its base in Ballarat Victoria for over 17 years, and continues to grow, steadily meeting the demands of a diverse customer base. The company specializes in surface and underground diamond drilling, with the surface business focusing on deep directional drilling while the underground business has been developing a robotics solution for a hands-free drill rig and rod carrier system.

The Titeline Group identified the need to diversify into the underground diamond drilling space in 2015. It was identified that developing an underground diamond drilling division would complement the current drilling business, providing an effective path for growth of the business as Titeline would be able to further the services they could offer to their current clientele as well as develop new clients. It would also help to insulate the business against downturns in the mining industry as underground drilling lowered Titeline’s exposure to the cyclical nature of exploration budgets by being involved in closer to the production cycle.

Titeline were able to build the drills, procure all auxiliary gear and hire 45 personnel in 3.5 months.

Our People

From a purpose-built workshop and offices in Ballarat, western Victoria, Titeline’s dedicated management team is led by the owners of the business, CEO David D’Astoli, General Manager Jeff Donaldson and General Manager Overseas Operations Stephen Gavin. This core leadership group boasts over 100 years of combined, varied and continuous experience in the drilling industry and is always looking to learn and continue to improve the business, as well as its outcomes for over 300 employees worldwide. The safety of its people has been at the forefront of everything the company does. As well as building robust safety systems and an Integrated Management System that all meet ISO standards and cover every aspect of our operations, Titeline continuously searches for practical solutions that remove hazards from the work place.

New Operations Underground

One exciting recent development is our move into the underground diamond-drilling market. Titeline Drilling made the decision to diversify the business with the appointment of a dedicated General Underground Manager, Greg Wythes; Greg joined the company in 2015 after leading several major underground projects, including Rio North Parkes and block cave conditioning at Newcrest Cadia.

With the support of existing customer Mining Metals Group (MMG) at their Rosebery base metals mine on the West Coast of Tasmania, Titeline Drilling Underground won a contract to drill 80,000m per annum of resource definition drilling. In a short time-frame Titeline Drilling commissioned the design of a unique mobile drilling machine based on field-proven Boart Longyear components. With the ability to move and set up quickly, drill from +90 to -90 degrees and to depths of 1500 m, these machines have performed beyond expectation, allowing us to exceeded our customers’ production KPI in the second full month of operations, without incident. Subsequent to this ramping up, Titeline Underground secured its second contract with Newmont Tanami Operations in the Northern Territory, a combined grade control and resource definition contract requiring over 100 km to be drilled per annum.