If you want to work in the oilfield

Oh my. I'd assumed that was a typo.

Well, you can make six figures in the oil patch but you sure as hell can't make *high* six figures....

 

I was making 130k from 2011-2013 in ND.There were other drivers making more and thats not adding in 401k.

 

Here’s another thing that nobody mentions with those sand hauling figures,it’s a 24/7 operation so you can guess the rest.Dedication and sacrifices because if not that number drops substantially.

 

There was quite a few weeks my dad did 2500+ gross as a company driver. Hourly rate + OT and load bonus if you did 3 or more loads a day. That was back when it was still booming tho

 

I've done salt water, sand boxes and pneumatics.

Salt water is mostly paid hourly in day cabs. You actually spend more time outside the truck than inside the truck. You're typically alone trying to find your tank out on some ranch somewhere. Then once you find your tank you gotta go up and Guage the tank then hook up to the pot and pull your load to take to disposal. Again, you're on your own. You're not typically going onto an active job site. You're pulling from tanks that probably nobody has visited since God only knows when. Invest in a good hard hat light as there won't be any light except for the ones on your truck.

Sand is typically paid % of the load. There are local sand haulers but most are running sleeper trucks. Typical schedule is 3 weeks out then 1 week home. Some drivers will do 4 and 1 and many companies let you do 6 then 2. Sandboxes are hauled on a container chassis. No real training needed for that. Just unlock the corners when you get on site, pull up to the dance floor, the forklift takes off your full box(s) then gives you empty(s) and you lock it down then go for the next load. Pneumatics require some training but it isn't bad. They take longer to unload but they also hold alot more sand and come with much bigger payouts. So you'd have to do 5 sandbox loads to make the money of 3 pneumatic loads. However if that pneumatic driver can manage to get the same number of loads as the sand box guys then he'll make a lot more money. Neither is immune from the staging pad or long lines.

My experience has all been in Texas so I wouldn't know everything about North Dakota or Pennsylvania.

 

The load I'm on now is a 400mi run. So I'm not going to get multiples of these done today. This will be my one load for the day. The gross payout to the truck is $4,300. The loads I've been doing all last week were 92mi runs. 2 a day is average but if you're really ambitious you can get in 3 a day. The gross payout is $820 to the truck for each one of those runs. Is that enough to cover your truck payment? I get 25% as a company driver.

 

That's really good dough for a company driver. That's really what it should be in the industry putting up all the funky hours the oilfield requires. We pulled boxes for sandbox a few years for around 6 months. Averaged right around 1800 per shift.

On those long ones like that you had to time it just perfect to get 3 loads. Most of the time we'd get 4 loads on the shorter fracs

 

I'm running a pneumatic so it takes a little longer to unload than the sand boxes. Fortunately lately I haven't spent any time on staging pads. I've been able to get in fairly quickly. When I did sand boxes before I was always in long lines.

 

Do the boxes pay detention? It was 75hr after 1 hr