Oil and gas companies searching for workers

Wanted: Career-minded individuals to work for dozens of Northern Colorado companies. Must love to work outdoors. Long hours but guaranteed overtime pay. Good benefits packages. Salaries $40,000-$70,000.

This could be a want-ad for the entire oil and gas industry in Northern Colorado. The combination of a boom in oil and gas development and an aging workforce has created a labor shortage across the industry.

There’s a need at the professional level for geologists and petroleum engineers as well as in the field for hourly workers

The labor shortage was one reason for the recent arrival of crews and rigs from China to drill wells on Colorado’s Western Slope, the state’s oil and gas hot spot. More Chinese rigs and crews are expected to start drilling wells later this month in Garfield and Moffat counties.

Chinese crews haven’t been called to Northern Colorado’s Wattenberg Field, but the labor shortage has people like Lee Daniel looking to hire 30 people between now and the end of the year. Daniel, president of the Rocky Mountain region for Complete Energy Services, also anticipates the need for more than 100 new employees next year.

“Because of the current global outlook about the industry, there is long-term opportunity for steady jobs,´ said Daniel, whose company is based in Houston, and has an office in Frederick. “Young people are only beginning to see it.”

Daniel said service companies like his haven’t spent enough time developing or training new people. He attributes that to the roller-coaster nature of the oil and gas industry, which during the past 20 years has gone through a number of booms and declines.

The average age in the oil and gas industry is 47 years old, said Greg Schnacke, executive vice president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association.

“Think ahead a decade, and those 47-year-olds will be 57 and ready to move on to other endeavors,” Schnacke said. “There has been a labor shortage building for 20-30 years. It’s really nothing new.”

There are obstacles to recruiting people to work in the oil and gas industry. The days can be long, and jobs involve hard, physical work in remote areas.

The industry also suffers a reputation for pervasive drug use, Daniel said. Most companies require employees to undergo a pre-employment drug test plus random drug screening.

“Most of it is people smoking marijuana,´ said David Munoz, vice president of sales and marketing for Production Control Services, a Fort Lupton-based company that manufactures equipment for the oil and gas industry. “It becomes a serious safety issue. It’s hard enough to maintain a high safety rating when workers are sober. Operating the equipment is dangerous.”

Some people in the industry are working on ways to remedy the labor shortage. Recently Schnacke lobbied the state legislature to divert surplus collected from the industry to the Colorado Energy Research Institute.

Some of the money – about a third of the $3 million surplus that came from a state tax on energy companies – will be used to develop a work force in the oil and gas industry.

That will come in the form of grants and awards to community colleges and vocational schools for oil, natural gas and renewable energy programs, Schnacke said.

EnCana, a Canada-based company and a top gas producer in Colorado, gave $3 million to Colorado Mountain College in May toward the college’s capital campaign to build a new campus in Rifle. The college offers training programs for oil and gas workers in western Colorado.

Other companies are developing new ways to retain the employees they have. Oklahoma-based Kerr-McGee Corp. is one of the major drilling companies in the Wattenberg Field, an oil and gas formation that stretches from Brighton to Greeley, also known as the Denver-Julesburg formation. Kerr-McGee, which operates 3,700 wells in the Wattenberg Field, offers a unique work schedule.

In a two-week period, employees work 80 hours in nine days and get every other Friday off, said Jay Hawkins, director of human resources for Kerr-McGee’s oil and gas division. The company also offers flex time, which allows employees to start work earlier and end earlier to better accommodate their schedules.

Schnacke said Northern Colorado is in a better position than the Western Slope for attracting and retaining oil and gas field workers. The biggest reason is federal regulations restrict drilling on federal land on the Western Slope to a certain number of months a year, he said. By contrast, companies can drill all year long in Northern Colorado.

“It’s hard to attract local workers unless companies can offer them year-round employment, Schnacke said. “Northern Colorado has that advantage. There are more opportunities to keep people on and develop them.”

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