We've got gas (almost)
In May Tammy called the gas company to see if we could get gas for our house (we have an oil burner now which was getting a little old). After a lot of circling around they finally said "yes" and this week the contractor finally showed up (yes 5 months later!) to run a new gas main and drop to our house.
I thought the whole thing was very interesting. The gas main ended 300 feet from our house and the gas company decided to run it 400 feet to serve everyone on our end of the street (due to Tammy's work two others have already signed up). The gas lines are plastic and come in 40' sections about 4" in diameter. To start the process the sections are all fused together using heat (450F) and pressure. In parallel they used a horizontal drilling rig to drill from the new end of the main to the hole dug where the old main ended.
The tip of the drill can be located very accurately using an RF directional finder and the rig operator gets steering instructions via radio. The drill tip can be steered remotely to go up, down, left and right. After the tunnel is drilled, the gas pipe is connected to the drill tip and pulled back through the tunnel. Pretty cool to drill a horizontal hole 5 feet under ground and come out within inches of your target 400 feet away.
Our neighbors were quite concerned the drilling would cause their driveway to collapse. Actually, the contractor said that if they aren't careful the driveways will heave UP. The drill uses a water and bentonite lubricant that is pumped into the hole. Near the driveways they had to dig some pressure relief holes to let the lubricant run out.
Although the pipe looks pretty rigid, it is actually amazingly flexible. To keep it out of the way before it was pulled it was stored on a side street and when it was pulled into the tunnel it bent around at 90 degrees in about a 4' radius with no problems. Even more amazing to me, when they spliced the new main onto the existing main they did it by putting a clamp on the existing main and simply smashing it flat so no gas could come out. Then they cut the cap off the old main and used a hub to heat fuse it to the new one (all with gas in the main).
Running the drops was interesting too. A tap for the drop is heat fused onto the main and pierces the main without any loss of gas. The drop was run from the main under our street using a small air pressure driven tunneling rig. The operator aims it by eye, sets it level, and an air hammer inside the tip pulls it along underground.
That worked to get under the street, so we have a gas line running to the end of our driveway. However it got stuck in our tree roots, so they couldn't get the gas line to the house. They are supposed to be back soon with another tool for that.
Interesting solutions and a lot less mess than trenching all over, the final result (despite our neighbors fears) left almost no signs of the digging or tunnelling.