Update: Greetings to readers arriving from The Million Dollar Way! Enjoy! Oh, by the way MDW, you are very welcome. For other readers, if you enjoy my writing on energy in general, Bakken in particular, and the wide open frontier of the energy revolution, somewhere around one-quarter of the credit for what I know goes to the learning provided by MDW.
I’ll make a guess we will be hearing lots more stories of hiring in Bakken. Some recent articles:
- Two articles on oil companies hiring fracking crews
- Scuttlebutt is staffing shortages to develop
- Two articles on Target Logistics converting crew camp into hotel
12/29 – Grand Forks Herald at Dickinson press – Oil companies hiring fracking crews in Bakken – Job Service North Dakota said there are 60 companies wanting to staff up fracking crews. Each crew will need between 45 and 65 workers, so that something in the range of 300 or 350 jobs in the new year.
Let’s extend that out. The Million Dollar Way helps us in a post asking Worker Shortage Looming In The Bakken on 12/30.
It takes about two or three days to frack a well. Assume two wells per crew per week. That would be 12 wells a week for 6 crews, or somewhere around 48 wells in a four-week month. Keep in mind that’s on top of whatever fracking crews are in the field now.
Also keep in mind that staff is only for the fracking crews. Massive amounts of sand, measured in millions of pounds, is needed for each frack. I have no idea how that translates into the number of trips for a truck. Post at MDW suggests it could be something in the range of 2000 trips for each frack. Even if that is high by a factor of four or low by a factor of two, that is a huge amount of truck traffic.
Multiply that number of round trips by trucks times something in the range of 50 wells a month and there will be a huge number of jobs for truck drivers.
Oh, also keep in mind all the ancillary services to keep diesel engines at the sites running. Also, there will need to be mechanics to keep all those trucks running ‘round the clock.
1/31 – The Million Dollar Way – Whiting Looks to Increase Bakken Workforce – With tongue-in-cheek, article suggests Whiting has a veeeeeeery loooooooong term way to solve their staffing needs ….
…
…they donated $50,000 to a new obstetrics room in a new facility in Williston.
Equally revealing, the article says that “(e)veryone agrees” there will be staffing shortage in Bakken.
I will make a wild guess that we will soon hear of workers starting to flow back into Bakken. I heard it from a little birdie.
1/11 – Dickinson Press – Williston OKs new plan to turn old crew camp into hotel facility – Can’t see full article without approving a tracking cookie and other unknown and undisclosed monitoring tools onto my computer. Lede says city has approved Target Logistics converting one of their facilities into a hotel.
1/12 – The Million Dollar Way – Target Logistics Man Camp May Be Converted to Hotel – As I thought, this is the facility at 13 104th St East. That is on the north side of town, adjacent to US 2 by the Love’s gas station.
Hotel will have 636 beds.