Off Road Trucking

Off road trucking in the oil and gas industry can be fun, challenging, and financially rewarding. This section of our Oilfield trucking series is where we’ll cover the different types of oilfield driving jobs you could choose from.

For those of you that just landed on this page, this is Section 5 of our series on Oilfield Trucking. A comprehensive look at all the things you should know if you’re considering a career in this field.

There’s a lot to know about driving in the oilfield, so hopefully this section will give you some direction on what job will suit you.

The oilfield Lease

The resources required to drill a well and put it into production are huge and this means many different types of trucking jobs. It starts with clearing land and building the roads and leases, and ends with oil and gas flowing from the well. It would be impossible to compile this list of off road trucking jobs without missing something, or someone, but I’ll do my best to cover as much as I can.

If you missed it in one of our previous articles, here is a great video to explain the overall process of drilling and fracturing.

What is an Oilfield Lease?

An “Oilfield Lease” is the area of land occupied by the oil company for the purpose of drilling, servicing and producing oil or gas. This is where you’ll travel to find the drilling rig, the fracturing service company, and everyone else involved in the process when off road trucking in the oilfields.

Think of it as being similar to a “right of way” for power transmission lines. They don’t have to physically own the land to use it. Hence the word lease.

The oil companies divide their work into two main segments after testing is done and before the production stage. There are trucking opportunities that exist in both of these segments. Some off road trucking companies have equipment that will service both of these divisions. These segments are Drilling and Completions.

Drilling

After all the seismic testing (Subsurface imaging) and geological assessments have determined where you’re going to put a hole, the roads and leases are built to accommodate drilling rigs. This is the first major part of the process to bring a well into production.

There’s lots of different jobs to choose from even before the rig is brought in like clearing, logging and road building. Next, rig movers bring in the rig and set it up with flat deck and crane work. Once it’s set up, they’ll need products to service it like fluids, drilling products, and other materials. There will be “Drill Cuttings” produced that will need to be hauled away to special landfill sites using end dump trailers.

So here is a short list of some of the off road trucking jobs associated with drilling. Don’t forget the work that goes into clearing lands and setting up camps to house workers in remote areas.

• Logging
• Bed truck and winch truck drivers
• Rig shack and camp shack hauling
• Rig movers
• Pipe haulers
• Cranes and picker trucks
• Heavy equipment haulers, road builders, road graders, and equipment operators
• Cementing crews from service companies
• Fluid haulers – water, drilling fluids, oil, fuel, propane, etc.
• End dump truck driving jobs
• Storage tank haulers
• Rig mat hauling
• Grocery trucks for rig camps

Some truck drivers may also have tickets to operate heavy equipment. If you’re looking for an opportunity to get out of that seat for a while, you may want to consider working for one of the many oilfield construction companies. Building the leases and roads can provide very steady high paying jobs.

Continue reading Off Road Trucking…..

Working both drilling rigs and fracturing

I mentioned some companies offer many types of trucking services instead of being specialized in one area. I spent one winter season with a fluid hauling company that did this.

I was required to operate vac trucks, haul water, frac oil, other fluids, and also end dump truck driving. The company also had hot oiler trucks, and pressure trucks which I didn’t have the pleasure of operating.

Sometimes I’d be servicing a drilling rig, and other times I’d be involved in the fracturing process. You get to see a little of everything, and if you have a positive attitude and a willingness to learn, your versatility will earn you more money.

Bulker work makes up a very large portion of the off road trucking jobs in the oilfields. Tank truck drivers, pneumatic bulk work (cement and frac sand hauling) and dump truck driving jobs are all in high demand.

Superfracking started in recent years and has pushed the requirements of frac products to new levels. Hundreds of tons of frac sand needed to do a job how now becomes thousands. 400 BBL Tanks set up on location have been replaced by c-rings, lakes and man made ponds for water requirements.

There was a time when we went to a new frac location every day and now you could find yourself servicing the same lease for weeks.

Completions

In its most simplified form, completions is a term used after drilling is completed to prepare the well for production. We mentioned fracturing service companies a few times and completions is where the majority of their work comes in. They also provide cementing services needed during the drilling process for the casing but it’s a smaller part of their business.

Trying to talk during a fracturing job is like standing beside a shuttle launch and carrying on a conversation. The pumper units on a large fracturing job can have the equivalent horsepower of a Saturn rocket launch. We’re talking about the noise of 20,000 horsepower or more.

If you get involved in the fracturing and well servicing side of the business you can expect to haul:

• Cryogenics like Co2 and nitrogen
• Bulk transport work (fracturing sand and cement)
• Water
• Frac oils
• Machinery and fracturing equipment
• Wireline trucks
• Hot oilers
• Picker trucks and cranes
• Storage tanks and other vessels needed on locations
• Pressure trucks
• Vacuum trucks
• Acid trucks

Production work

After the well is producing, there can be a substantial amount of production work. We mentioned before about the various products that can be produced from a well. (Oil, water, crude oil, condensates, etc…) Gas wells are tied in directly to a pipeline and move through processing plants along the way. Oil wells usually flow into a tanks system to be picked up on location and delivered to midstream pipeline facilities or rail yards.

Production runs are among one of the steadiest paying oilfield jobs. If you’re looking for consistency, this is one of your safest choices. We mentioned before about steady money over sporadic ups and downs with a higher wage. Well this is a great example.

The down side to production runs is you may find yourself working on Christmas day. They don’t shut down the wells for holidays. On the fracturing and service side, things are usually shut down over the Christmas holidays. Working through the holidays on the drilling side is hit or miss depending on where they are in the process.

There is also “Infield” work moving products from lease to lease if you don’t like much highway work. You could see plenty of highway hauling crude oil to midstream facilities or rail yards. Midstream facilities are where the oil is introduced into the pipeline system. Rail yards are where unrefined crude is shipped to other places in North America to be refined.

Continue reading Off Road Trucking…..

Camp Jobs

Camp jobs are popular for truck drivers that don’t want to do a lot of driving. They’re also good for keeping expenses down. Living in a camp means your meals, rooms, and laundry are all paid for. Camp jobs often require you to work for, or be contracted to the oil company or drilling rig directly. You could be hauling water, operating a vacuum truck, or other equipment like road graders, excavators, dozers, and tow tractor operators.

Camp jobs usually have a rotation, so you’ll still have to find a place to live when you’re not in the camp. Fly in, fly out situations are good if you can find them, but they’re getting harder to find with the economy the way it’s been.

“When things are slow, the perks will go.”

Hot shot services

One thing we left out that should be added is Hot Shot services. This is a great job for people that want to be involved in off road trucking, but don’t possess a truck driving license.

You could be delivering anything, at anytime, to anywhere. If someone needs a part to fix a drilling rig that’s shut down, they need it immediately so it’s a demanding job. It’s costing thousands of dollars an hour to stop production. Hot shot companies can have every class of vehicle depending on the size of what you’re hauling.

Oilfield Truckers Log Book

Some companies operate under a special permit in Alberta if their primary business is delivering or picking up from a well site. To sum it up as simply as possible, it’s a 24 day cycle with drivers having to show 3 periods of 24 hours off in the 24 days. So you can work 21 days straight on this cycle before having to take 72 hours off.

I wouldn’t worry about this until you’re working for a company that has this permit. They’ll require you to take a few courses that are a mandatory part of them holding the permit. You’ll learn more about it when you take the courses.

Companies have to jump through a few hoops to qualify for this as you can read here at this link.  “Oilfield Exemption Permit” If you visit this link, you’ll also find other links for those interested in learning more about the permit.

Ice Road Trucking

I’m currently in the process of writing an e-book specifically about ice road trucking in the Northwest Territories. This should be available sometime in the summer or fall of 2016, so keep your eyes posted for it. The book itself will cover a 60 day season with lots of stories and a few hundred pictures.

So how does northern oilfield trucking differ from ice road trucking? If you end up trucking in the oilfields, you’ll find a lot of drivers have worked in both of these area. Ice road trucking pays well, but the season can be very short. Ice road truckers often switch to oilfield trucking because there’s a longer season and more of a guarantee.

You’ll find northern oilfield roads are similar to what you may find in ice road trucking. Oilfield trucking is not limited to any particular area, and can serve some extremely remote locations across the western sedimentary basin. This is all considered western off road trucking. There’s a small amount of Oilfield work going on in the Northwest Territories for those of you that like the extreme cold.

Ice road trucking has dedicated and professionally built freight routes to remote areas over seasonal roads called “Winter Road”. They cross frozen rivers and lakes to provide supplies to mines and communities in the northern Canadian Territories and some parts of Alaska. Ice road truckers will encounter a variety of road conditions from pavement, gravel, bush roads, muskeg ice roads, to full ice roads crossing lakes and rivers.

Oilfield trucking has much of the same terrain, except for the lake and river ice roads. Although they both have their dangers and challenges, oilfield trucking terrain the most difficult. The grades are sometimes extreme, and you’re going to different locations every time. Having done both myself, I found the oilfield driving far more challenging than the ice roads.

Muskeg Ice Roads

Northern British Columbia and up to Ft. Nelson there are large oilfields only accessible in the winter. They’re called Muskeg areas (low lying bogs or swamps), and have a different type of ice road. They actually build the roads up like a skating rink in layers after it starts freezing in the winter.

Water truck flooding progressively builds the thickness of ice in layers. This thick layer of ice over the muskeg allows the road to support heavy equipment and supplies brought by trucks. These are usually only shorter secondary roads built off the main gravel roads to service the oilfield lease.

So we covered some off road trucking jobs, and where they fit within the oil and gas industry. Next we’ll get into some specifics of what you can expect driving off road, including information on chaining up truck tires.

Thanks for reading Off Road Trucking

Let’s move on to Oilfield Driving.