It’s been a mixed bag of news in the oil and gas industry recently, but I’ll start with the good.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ job numbers for the first quarter of 2014 show promising news for the industry. The first figure that stands out is the 7,000 jobs created in support activities for oil and gas, which is up from 4,500 over the same period last year. Of those 7,000 jobs, 3,300 were created in March alone.
In oil and gas extraction, 4,200 positions were created through March. That’s 1,700 positions more than the same period last year. The bureau also reports that 400 oil and gas extraction jobs were created in April.
In total, there were 10,800 jobs created in the oil and gas industry in the first quarter of 2014.
One thing that jumped out at me when reviewing the numbers was the fact that only 500 of the 10,800 oil and gas jobs created in the first quarter were filled by women compared to 2,000 of 6,300 in the first quarter of 2013.
In this issue of Gas, Oil and Mining Contractor you’ll read about three women who found work in the oil and gas industry and haven’t looked back.
These women are working side-by-side with men, and while they say there have been challenges along the way, they are happy with their careers and encourage other women to get into the industry.
There are plenty of opportunities for women in the oilfields — from mud engineers to truck drivers and everything in between. It’s just a matter of getting the right training, working hard and proving yourself.
While GOMC highlights the positive advances in the oil and gas industry, it’s no secret that accidents sometimes cast a shadow. Two accidents that happened on April 30 show the need for continued safety training and the need to improve rail transport safety.
Early that morning, two men were killed and nine more injured following an explosion at a drill site in Orla, Texas. The nine workers injured suffered only minor cuts, lacerations and bruising from shrapnel, but two men lost their lives in the explosion.
The Loving County Sheriff’s Department said there were as many as 15 people on site at the time of the explosion. According to the sheriff’s department, workers for RKI (the company operating the site) were putting in a wellhead and the pressure line built up, resulting in a pressure explosion.
Later the same day, a CSX Corp. train carrying crude oil from the Bakken region derailed and burst into flames in downtown Lynchburg, Va., spilling oil into the James River and forcing hundreds to evacuate. CSX said 15 cars derailed and fire erupted on three of them. There were no injuries reported, thankfully.
News like this can give the industry a black eye. Accidents happen, but most of the time they’re preventable if proper safety measures are followed. Everyone in this industry is responsible for improving safety and making sure these types of accidents don’t happen.
And not all the news is bad. Many companies reported strong profits following the first quarter of 2014, and oil production in the Bakken region has reached 1 billion barrels. You can see more news updates in our GOM Pipelines feature in this issue of GOMC.
Also in this issue, we profile BeneTerra, a company that’s using its own technology to help with water recycling and reuse. The company, which was formed in 2002, has found a new more efficient way to recycle oil and gas wastewater using flare gas to generate steam. The water is returned to the atmosphere rather than a disposal well thousands of feet below ground.
I hope you can take something from each of these stories and use it to better your own business.
