Oilfield services firm Sanjel laying off 155 in Fort Lupton, Denver
FORT LUPTON — Sanjel Corp., a Canada-based oilfield services company that is liquidating its assets as part of bankruptcy proceedings, disclosed in a filing with the state of Colorado on Friday that it is laying off all 155 employees at its Denver and Fort Lupton offices as it winds down operations.
The company, headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, bases its U.S. business unit at 1630 Welton St. in Denver, where 54 of the layoffs will occur. The other 101 layoffs will come at its Fort Lupton facility at 15549 Colorado Highway 52.
Sanjel officials didn’t respond to interview requests Friday.
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The company last month agreed to sell its U.S. hydraulic-fracturing, coiled tubing and cementing assets to Denver-based Liberty Oilfield Services, which operates a pair of fracking fleets from its Henderson office and also has operations in North Dakota and Wyoming.
In the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act filing, Caleb Barclay, vice president of Sanjel’s U.S. business unit, wrote that all of the Colorado layoffs would occur on May 31 or within 14 days thereafter. He added that it’s unclear whether Liberty would be offering jobs to any of the affected employees.
Ron Gusek, vice president of technology and development for Liberty, said his firm’s acquisition of Sanjel assets is slated to close May 31.
Until this point, Liberty’s only service has been fracking. The company, he said, will have some overlap with Sanjel’s fracking fleets in North Dakota, but will gain territory in the Eagle Ford and Permian plays in Texas where Sanjel was operating the majority of its fracking operations.
Sanjel, he said, operates no fracking fleets in Colorado. He said Liberty’s hope is to continue Sanjel’s cementing and coiled tubing services run from the Fort Lupton site. Liberty is still working out the details of whether it will move those services to Henderson or keep them in Fort Lupton, as well as how many Sanjel employees might be offered positions.
Liberty’s operations in Colorado include about 50 employees at its corporate headquarters in Denver and between 150 and 200 employees based in Henderson.
“As for exact plans on facilities and staffing levels, all of that’s still under way in terms of precision,” Gusek said, adding that the aim is to make those decisions as quickly as possible “just so (Sanjel) folks have an understanding of their future.”
Sanjel opened its Fort Lupton facility in 2013 to meet growing demand in the Denver-Julesburg Basin, which lies mostly in Northern Colorado but also in southeast Wyoming and southwest Nebraska. But the prolonged downturn in oil prices of the past year and a half has pummeled the industry and caused many companies to sell or go out of business.
