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The Romanettis aren’t the only ones to reap benefits from the gas industry by finding a new need and setting out to fill it.
Just 10 miles up the road, Paul Battista, who has owned Sunnyside Supply for 28 years, has seen his sales double and his inventory triple after he revamped his store to service the gas industry. He stocks everything from fire-resistant clothing to filters, valves, and measurement tools needed in gas processing.
Battista for years had specialized in selling equipment to local manufacturers. But when he realized the gas business was growing around him, he did some research. “It’s calling people in Oklahoma and asking them, ‘Well, what do you do for these guys?’ and ‘What is it that they look for?’ and ‘How do they operate?’”
One big change: He and his wife have learned to expect calls on Sunday. Battista remembers getting an apology from one gas company customer who couldn’t wait until Monday for a 20-by-30-foot steel building to cover a compressor. “He said, ‘Tell your wife I’m sorry, I kind of lose track of what day of the week it is,’ ” Battista recalls. “In this business, they don’t think about when the day is done, but when the job is done.”
Because rig equipment costs are so high, it is typical throughout the oil and gas industry to run drill sites 24 hours a day. In the Marcellus, the out-of-state workers typically live at the drill location in mobile trailers for two weeks at a time, working 12-hour shifts seven days a week, then heading home for two weeks off. It’s no wonder that some of the first Pennsylvanians who are actually getting jobs doing the actual drilling are workers used to grueling schedules—war veterans.
One of them is Joshua Cannon, 30, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, who served three tours of duty in Iraq, the last two with the Army’s highly regarded 101st Airborne Division. He was discharged in 2008, just as the recession hit, and found nothing but heartache in his search for a salaried job to support his wife and two children.
He lost out on a job as manager of a discount variety store to a candidate with a business administration degree. The work he did find was making deliveries—sometimes earning $200 a day, sometimes $20 a day, depending on calls completed—with no benefits. He and his wife tried to move out of their cramped and cold apartment, but on the day of closing on their new house, the bank refused the loan because he had no steady salary. “I felt like I survived being in intense combat for three years, and I can’t survive in Pittsburgh,” Cannon says.
He decided to see whether there were any opportunities in a business he had first heard about from an old friend—gas drilling in the Marcellus shale. He got the call, and started work last February.
“Some days it’s intensive labor, where you have to tackle one project individually or as a team,” he says. “Other days, when the driller is turning knobs and pushing buttons, you have to figure out little projects throughout the rig to keep things running. It might be cleaning or fixing or organizing something. It’s a good balance of work.” And it’s a steady salary, including health insurance and a 401 (k). “It’s a golden opportunity on so many levels,” Cannon says.
But for now, Cannon is an exception.
Gas companies say they want to move to a more local workforce on rigs, but the technical nature of the job—the actual driller manages the well from a bay of computer screens in an enclosed control room high in the derrick—means that only a small percentage of the team can be made up of inexperienced workers, producers say.
Certainly, the jobs are attractive. The average oil and gas worker salary in Pennsylvania is about $60,000, or 50 percent higher than the average private wage job in the state, according to the Pennsylvania Economy League of Southwestern Pennsylvania. But job experts say at least 75 percent of rig workers are from out of state.
“There’s a lot of talk about the pick-up trucks with Texas and Oklahoma license plates,” says Joe Iannetti, principal of the Western Area Career and Technology Center (WACTC) in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. “They’re skilled and good people and we like them because they spend their money here. But we want to see some Pennsylvania license plates at those work sites. I think that’s our duty, to make sure we can provide people who can work those jobs.”
So in the summer of 2009, WACTC, which draws students from nine public school districts in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Washington County and also provides adult workforce transition training, began a specialized program in Marcellus shale jobs. Nearly 90 students have been through the program so far. When he approached the gas companies that are now sponsoring the program and providing equipment, “they said we were a little bit ahead of them,” Iannetti says. “And I think that’s good—we believe we should be producing people before they need them, not after they need them.”
But jobs programs across the state have found there’s at least one way Pennsylvanians can immediately find jobs in the shale business—hauling pipes, equipment, sand, chemicals, water, and wastewater to and from drill sites. The U.S. National Park Service’s geologic resources division, which is looking at impact of shale development, estimated that it takes 300 to 1,400 truckloads to bring an average well to production. Penn College in Williamsport, which has not had a driving curriculum in recent years, began truck sessions each month after its needs assessment showed enormous demand for drivers. The gas companies need people behind the wheel who are accustomed to managing Pennsylvania’s icy roads in winter, says Michael, and trained for the rough off-road driving needed to reach the drill sites.
WACTC’s commercial drivers’ license program will do $1 million of business this year—a 15-fold increase since the shale industry arrived, says Iannetti, and the school is placing students in jobs as fast as it can graduate them.
Lee Zavislak was delighted with WACTC’s training program, although she admits she was intimidated at first by the idea of driving an 18-wheeler. And she did not easily see herself in a heavy industrial setting—she had passed on one possible steel mill opportunity because the vapors and dust in the enclosed space seemed unhealthy. She lives in a rural community because she loves peace and quiet and has mixed feelings about the new energy business.
“It’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing,” she says. “I think short-term, it’s a very, very good thing, it will provide a lot of jobs, a lot of people will make a lot of money . . . and also [will be] creating American fuel instead of foreign. But then there’s health risks. Our environment . . . nobody can really predict what the damage is going to be.”
Within two months of earning her commercial driver’s license, Zavislak started a new job last month as a utility warehouse person and back-up truck driver for a local welding supply operation. Welding is one of the many local trade industries that have seen demand surge since the arrival of the shale gas industry. After the frustration of unemployment and a year of job searching, she was overjoyed to land a position that matched the salary and benefits she earned at the Dasani factory.
Despite her qualms about the industry that is generating the bulk of the new trucking jobs in the region, Zavislak looks at the big picture, and the benefit of gaining a skill she hopes will be in demand regardless of the gas industry’s fortunes: “Every single thing, anywhere, is moved by a truck,” she says.
*This report is produced as part of National Geographic’s Great Energy Challenge initiative, sponsored by Royal Dutch Shell, which recently acquired a stake in the Marcellus shale. National Geographic maintains autonomy over content.
Read the entire special report, with photos, interactive map and illustration of the process, at THE GREAT SHALE GAS RUSH.