unexpected work due to a tanking oil industry
A part of my work for an electric co-op that has been constant over the last few years is the oil and gas patch. Drillers will poke a hole in the ground in some of the most remote parts of the county. The amount of money to be ultimately realized in a producing well is apparent when you see them building 4 miles of road just to get to the site. And the subscriber’s cost portion for delivering power service to such a remote site can be several hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I had a business huddle the other day with the R/W department to discuss handling the current social and economical changes that are upon us. One of the matters we discussed was the possibility of the oil patch drying up for a while with the volatility of the market.
When these producers need grid to run their wells and such the co-op’s engineering get the plans complete and then the producer’s portion of the cost is calculated. Like I said, sometimes this can be a staggering figure. So nothing really happens on the ground until the production company ponies up their part of the cost to get the grid extended to their well site. It’s evident that this can take some time because it’s not uncommon to get a work order that is 6 months or even a year old. In the interim the wells are powered by APUs. Over the last few weeks my number of oil and gas related work orders has actually increased by quite a bit. The oil producers are writing big checks now to get all these wells permanent electric service. And the dates on the work orders are predictably older.
Seeing how we all had just discussed this portion of our work would be “slowing down” I was confused with the increase. I had to call head of the R/W department and ask if he thought it odd also. He had noticed it too and talked to some of his contacts at the production companies. Well, it seems as though they are all polishing up all their “loose ends” on their well sites so they can “put them on the market” to attempt to offset a sudden need for cash, no doubt due to crashing oil prices.
I hate see any industry suffer. I guess my work picked up for a bit due to their misery. Who’d a thunk? But I’ll take it.
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