Iba Drilling Company, Inc41 Road 550 , PO Box 1041 , Glendive, Montana, United States

Mike Iba, founder of Iba Drilling Company, Inc., got his start in the drilling business when he began helping on a water well rig in the 1970s at the age of 18. After several years, he was offered to buy the rig from his employer and in February of 1977 incorporated Iba Drilling in the state of Montana.      Throughout the 1980s, Iba Drilling grew to become a major player in the seismic industry with a handful of rigs operated by talented drillers. They drilled thousands of boreholes throughout Montana and North Dakota for a variety of exploration companies searching for oil-bearing formations.      In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Iba Drilling expanded into mineral exploration with a custom built reverse circulation rig that worked on a mine in South Dakota for over a decade. During that time, Iba Drilling invested heavily into heli-portable equipment which was able to be placed, by helicopter, in incredibly remote locations.      Ground source heat pump systems were becoming popular in the 1990s and Iba Drilling was able to adapt its equipment to being installing them. This area of work became one of our most popular services and continues to be to this day.     Iba Drilling Co., Inc. is based in Glendive, Montana with its shop located just north of town. It was built in 1978 and has been the base of operations that have extended to the surrounding states and beyond. In 2011, Chris Iba, Mike’s youngest son, began working full time for Iba Drilling after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Montana Tech in Butte, Montana. He has since become president of Iba Drilling and continues operations with values learned from his father including craftsmanship, cleanliness, customer service, and attention to detail. 

GeoThermal

• Geothermal, better known as ground source heat pump systems or geo-exchange, is a way to heat and cool your commercial building or residence. It is an alternative to heating systems like natural gas or electric strip heat and cooling systems like central air. Ground source has many advantages and is a very green way to provide climate control for any building.
• Ground source heat pumps work by moving heat between the climate controlled space of a building and the earth. In heat mode, energy is extracted from the earth via fluid moving through a series of buried pipes and used to heat the conditioned space. In cool mode the opposite happens. Heat is extracted from the air of the conditioned space and transferred to the pipe's circulating fluid where the energy is released into the ground.
• Heat pumps are very common. Nearly every home has at least one heat pump in the form of a refrigerator. So a refrigerator is cold on the inside; however, on the back or bottom of the refrigerator are metal coils which are hot. This is an example of a heat pump moving heat from the conditioned space of the refrigerator to the outside. In cool mode, a ground source heat pump works the same way, except instead of having those metal coils on the back or bottom of the refrigerator, there are a series of pipes buried underground which perform the same function.
• Geothermal is good because of its energy efficiency, Underground temperatures are relatively constant somewhere around 55F. We use this to our advantage in nearly every weather situation. In the summer, your central air conditioner is using hot summer air to cool the inside of your building. With geothermal, you are able to cool much more efficiently using the lower earth temperatures. In the winter, ground source heat pumps are able to extract heat from the earth instead of the cold air like an air-to-air heat pump (your central a/c is an air-to-air heat pump). This makes ground source heat pumps one of the most efficient ways to control climate in your building.
• We install what are called the ground loop heat exchangers. These are the series of pipes that are buried underground and are used to carry the circulating fluid from the heat pump unit to the earth. They are responsible for the heat exchange to and from the ground that makes the ground source heat pump work so efficiently. Iba Drilling also manufactures lateral headers which are the manifolds that distribute the fluid flow evenly among the sections of pipe.  â€‹