Wikipedia
Drill pipe, is hollow, thin-walled, steel or aluminium alloy piping that is used on drilling rigs. It is hollow to allow drilling fluid to be pumped down the hole through the bit and back up the annulus. It comes in a variety of sizes, strengths, and wall thicknesses, but is typically 27 to 32 feet in length (Range 2). Longer lengths, up to 45 feet, exist (Range 3).
Usage examples of "drill pipe".
The Deepwater contractors were operating for a different consortium now and a spanking new supply ship, straight from a Norwegian yard, began ferrying sealed containers of food with the drill pipe and other equipment.
Somewhere far down below among the twisted spars and drill pipe and cables and the flooded wreckage of the quarter boat were the bodies of my father and nineteen other men who went down with the rig when the drill bit punched into a pay sand and the wellhead blew.
Captain Furman is thrown over a control console, the floor twisting out from under him as twelve tons of steel drill pipe are hurled across the lower deck.
Superheated water was forced down a drill pipe into the dome, where it liquified the halite deposit, which was then forced up by the same pressure through a sec.
The invisible tonnage of drill pipe was quietly rusting deep in the rocky flesh of the earth, invisible to any human eye, but nonetheless there for the geological ages, a snapped-off rotting proboscis from a swatted greenhouse-effect mosquito.
Then we have to pull out the whole damned drill string, screw a new bit to the bottom of the drill pipe and lower the pipe back into the hole.