Zero To Hired: Oilfield Training For New Hands

What The Oilfield Actually Is

Before you can get hired and not look lost, you need the map. Most guys walk onto a location with zero idea who owns what, who works for who, or what stage the well is even in. They spend their first month confused. This lesson fixes that in 12 minutes. Read it twice.

Upstream, Midstream, Downstream

The whole oil and gas business splits into 3 pieces. You need to know which one you're walking into.

• Upstream is finding and producing it. Drilling wells, fracing them, getting oil and gas out of the ground. This is the oilfield most people mean when they say oilfield. This is almost certainly where you're headed.
• Midstream is moving and storing it. Pipelines, gathering systems, trucking, tank batteries, gas plants. Some field jobs live here too, especially trucking and pipeline.
• Downstream is refining and selling it. Refineries, chemical plants, the gas station. Different world, more plant and turnaround work than wellsite work.

The Life Of A Well

A well isn't one job. It's a sequence of stages, and different crews and companies show up at each stage. If you understand the sequence, you understand who's on location and why.

1. Lease and permit. The operator secures the right to drill and gets it permitted. No field crews yet, this is land and office work.
2. Drilling. A drilling rig and its crew drill the hole, sometimes 2 miles down and then 2 miles or more sideways. This is rig work. Floorhands, derrickhands, drillers, the company man. Cement crews come out during drilling too, to cement each string of casing in place.
3. Completion. After the hole is drilled and cased, the well gets completed so it can actually produce. This is where wireline, frac, and coil tubing crews show up. This is usually the busiest, most crowded stage on location.
4. Production. The well is making oil and gas. Now it's pumpers, lease operators, and roustabouts keeping it running, plus the tank batteries and equipment that handle what comes out.
5. Workover and intervention. Wells get sick. Something downhole fails, production drops, a problem needs fixing. Workover rigs, wireline, and coil go back in to fix it. This happens over and over across a well's life.
6. Plug and abandonment. At the end of its life the well gets plugged and the site reclaimed. Specialized crews handle this.

Operator vs Service Company

This is the single most important distinction in the whole industry and most new guys never get it explained. Get it now.

• The operator owns the well. They're the oil company. Names like Chord, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron. They decide what happens and they pay for everything.
• The service company does the actual work for the operator. They own the drilling rigs, the workover rigs, the wireline trucks, and the frac spreads. Names like Halliburton and SLB, plus hundreds of smaller independents you have never heard of.
• The company man, sometimes called the consultant or the rep, is the operator's man on location. He's the boss of the wellsite. He doesn't work for your company. He tells your company what he wants done, and your crew does it.

The Service Lines, And Where You Could Land

Service company is a huge umbrella. Here are the main field service lines and roughly what they do, so you know what you're applying into.

• Drilling contractors. They run the drilling rigs. Entry job is floorhand, also called worm or roughneck. Hard physical rig floor work.
• Frac and pumping. They pump fluid and sand downhole at high pressure to break the rock. Big crews, lots of equipment, lots of green hand entry through equipment operator and ground positions.
• Well servicing and workover. Workover rigs, also called service rigs, fix and maintain producing wells, and they're smaller than the rig that drilled them. Huge in the Bakken and the Permian. Common green hand entry as a floorhand on a workover rig.
• Cementing. They pump cement to set casing in place. Specialized pumping work.
• Snubbing, also called hydraulic workover. They run pipe into or pull it out of a well that's still under pressure, using a hydraulic jack instead of a conventional rig. Specialized, higher-skill pressure work.
• Coil tubing. They run a continuous steel pipe off a giant reel into the well for cleanouts and intervention. Closely related to wireline, overlapping skill set.
• Wireline. They run tools down the well on an electric or slickline to perforate, log, set plugs, and gather data. Entry job is the ground hand, sometimes called the operator helper. Heavy on rigging up, lifting, and learning the tool string.
• Flowback and well testing. After a well is fraced and brought on, they control, separate, and measure what comes back, oil, gas, water, and sand, before it settles into steady production. Common helper-level entry on completion crews.
• Production and lease operations. Pumpers and lease operators who keep producing wells running. More steady, less crew chaos, often a different pace.
• Roustabout and construction. There are really 2 flavors. One is a dedicated roustabout or construction outfit, crews that build, maintain, and clean up locations across a lot of wells, dirt work, setting equipment, pipe, and lease upkeep. The other is a roustabout attached to a rig, doing whatever general labor it needs, at the beck and call of whoever's running the job. Rig roustabout seats are rare now. The construction and maintenance outfits are the ones hiring green, and they're one of the most common true entry doors.
• Support services. Trucking, hot oil, vac trucks, hydrovac, rentals, and water transfer, which is usually a third-party crew laying hose and running pumps to feed the frac. Massive workforce, tons of entry points, and the trucking side rewards a CDL.

Where The Work Is: The Basins

Oil and gas comes from specific regions called basins or plays. The work is where the rock is. The major US onshore basins:

• Permian Basin, West Texas and southeast New Mexico. The biggest by far. Most rigs, most jobs, most of the national oilfield workforce. If you want the highest odds of getting hired, this is the deepest pool.
• Bakken, western North Dakota and eastern Montana. Smaller than the Permian but a major play. Brutal winters, strong pay, tight-knit. Dickinson, Williston, Watford City are hubs.
• Eagle Ford, South Texas. Major play, lots of completion and production work.
• Other significant areas include the Haynesville gas play in northwest Louisiana and East Texas, which picked up a lot of rigs on LNG export demand, the Marcellus and Utica gas plays in Appalachia, the Anadarko in Oklahoma, and the DJ Basin in Colorado.

Is Now Even A Good Time?

You'll see headlines screaming both directions. Here's how to read them.

Big oil company layoffs make scary headlines, and a lot of those cuts are corporate, engineering, and office seats after mergers, not field jobs. The number that tells you how the field itself is doing is the rig count, how many drilling rigs are turning to the right, and which way it's moving. The service companies and independents, the exact outfits that hire green hands, keep hiring because field turnover is constant and a wave of experienced hands is retiring.