Alberta oilfield driving jobs

hands down frac is the big money also the faster pace and harder work ive made over 1500/day on a big frac but it takes awhile to make bonus(i know a supervisor that has made 900/hr on good jobs, 3600 for a days work), if you start making bonus you may make up to 500 on a big frac, coil is ok , money is more then cement and less than frac ,jobs can be a few ours to a few weeks (if on a pad wells) . Cement is kinda blah, you get your call and you go to the drilling rig , then you sit and wait till they are ready for you sometimes up to 24 hrs or more.

Frac is always on the move (usually in the western 3 provinces) lots of driving and not much shop time at all. Coil can get real busy aswell, since after frac they need coil to clean out the well or mill out balls and collars. Cement has its perks like if a rig is close to needing cement you could get the day off with pay just in case they need you that night.

in the end coil and cement are more laid back but dont get me wrong they work hard when its go time. Frac is kind like the army , you will get yelled at alot and work your ### off, eg do a 11 hour frac then after its done you have to drive back and repack the pumps sleep for a few hours then get up and do it again. its not fun when your just making salary. but imo its the better choice because i rather work hard and have time go buy quick , over sitting on my ### being bored out of my mind.

 

Makes perfect sense, sorry for the misunderstanding.

Geo

 

Good to know.............anyone know how fluid hauling compares to fracking? How well does it pay? Hours a driver can expect?

 

welcome to hinton

 

Good question, I was wondering the same thing. I have seen quite a few fluid hauling positions and would like to know what exactly the job entails.

 

[h=1]Oil prices could sink below US$80 a barrel in next couple of weeks, says analyst[/h]http://business.financialpost.com/2012/06/20/oil-prices-sink-below-us83-a-barrel/?__lsa=8b1d3785

The questions I have for my oil patch mentors is at what point does falling crude oil prices really start to effect the oil patch? Because its more expensive to extract oil from oil sands, falling prices should effect Fort McMurray before any other area and the question can they fall to $70? Saw a graph from an analyst showing the marginal cost of production per barrel of oil to be around $80. At this moment in time, spot price is $80.61. To see how the oil economy reacts, are conventionally extracted oil s and fracking have the similar costs to extract oil? If the answer is yes, then falling oil prices will first of all hit oil sands hard and still leaving profit in 2:3 of the types of oil extraction in oil patch.
What this means is companies will be hiring less at one point especially first in the oils sands sector. The rain will stop and the fields will dry but the supply-demand curve seems at this point to be favoring the supply side. Simple economics shows that prices will fall but where will it bottom out?

Sorry to rain down on your parade: you've had enough for the month of June.

Ted

 

Fluid hauling has as many hours as you can handle available. The thousands of existing wells all produce oil and water every day that needs to be hauled to a battery or disposal site. When other people are down due to road restrictions it just means fluid haulers carry more smaller loads. Starting wages are often in the low to mid twenties, and high twenties when you know what you are doing, sometimes better. 7 hours of OT per day is common. Many of the companies are provincial so they just have to give 8 hours off between shifts, no 70 hour per week limits apply.

Different contracts have different levels of difficulty. Some guys have highway runs doin 2 - 4 loads a day, others are off road doing up to 14 a day.

 

The very expensive 'hyper-projects', like big offshore platforms and oil-sands mines are costed very carefully. When they put the projects together, its is always assumed that the price of oil will vary wildly within the project lifetime. As a result, you don't see too much variation in activity once a certain oil price level has been achieved and maintained for a while. Its a statistics problem at that point, not a day to day market problem.

OTOH, activity on smaller heavy oil land wells that are relatively low producers and relatively expensive to create/maintain can get shut down in a heartbeat if the market changes. Same thing for gas, same thing for unconventionally produced light oil.

And most of our day to day activity happens in the last group, so we can get very quiet very quickly.

The offshore guys don't see the same cycle of boom and bust we do in Alberta. They have their own cycle driven by slightly different factors spread over a longer period. So do the oil sands.

Right now its very hard to separate out being quiet because of the weather from being quiet because of a lull in activity brought on by market conditions. Once things dry out we will know for sure what activity levels are going to look like this summer. For now, I am personally quite wary about the situation.

Geo

 

Hurrah Nitrogen, very well said.

 

Cariboo_kid, thanks for the great information. You have confirmed what I suspected and hoped. Regarding OT rates, is OT @1.5 or 2.0? OT begins after 8 hours?

I did a Google search last night and found a few jobs in tiny little towns in Sask and AB. Places nobody ever heard of except those who live there. Would you recommend working for a small mom&pop outfit in a place like that? My thinking is I wouldn't have much of a choice given my total lack of experience.