ABOUT COLIN RICE

Colin Rice established Colin Rice Exploration and Training in September 2009 with the purpose of offering consulting and training services to the exploration drilling industry.

After leaving university, Colin taught high school mathematics in Zimbabwe for eight years before moving to South Africa in 1984. He has been actively involved in many aspects of the Southern African drilling industry since then.

He was a founder partner in SA Mud Services (Pty) Ltd, later SAMCHEM (Pty) Ltd and he was Managing Director of Professional Diamond Drilling Equipment (Pty) Ltd for eleven years when the company was acquired by Atlas Copco AB.  In 1995, Colin and his business partner launched Borehole Survey (Pty) Ltd and imported the very first electronic borehole survey tools into the country. Borehole Survey (Pty) Ltd was a first service company in sub-Saharan Africa to utilize state of the art electronic survey tools and the successful application of electronic survey technology acted a springboard for the systems in other African countries. 

Colin has always had a keen interest in improving the level of understanding of drilling principles through training and was responsible for setting up the National Diploma, Drilling Practice Course at Technikon SA. He has been delivering drilling and exploration related courses at a number of institutions and in a number of other Southern African countries for the past twenty years.

Colin is the Chairman of the newly launched Drilling Industry Certification Authority of South Africa (DICASA) and President of the Borehole Water Association of Southern Africa.

Colin is a member of the steering committee of the Pilot Carbon Storage Project, part of a joint World Bank and SANEDI project and is an Honorary Fellow of the Geological Society of South Africa. More recently, Colin was a member of the working group that designed the newly registered QCTO Driller qualifications. 

In 2017, Colin Rice Exploration and Training (Pty) Ltd. proudly re-launched "DrillSafe, The Southern African Drilling Industry Safety Forum". Colin is the driving force behind DrillSafe which aims to improve the ability of people involved in the drilling industry to effectively identify hazards on drill sites and manage the associated risks.