Alberta NDP defeated again (as they did in 2016) resolution calling for moratorium on fracking, even defeated a friendly amendment to do in-depth independent study of adverse effects. “Jobs” & corporate profits trump public health & water yet again. But in the oil patch, jobs are being left behind: “I don’t see a future.” … “Pretty soon every rig will have one worker and a robot.”

PROPOSED  RESOLUTION – THAT WAS AGAIN DEFEATED (AS IT WAS IN 2016) ON FEBRUARY 11, 2017, NDP Provincial Council, University of Calgary–  NATURAL RESOURCE EXPLORATION AND EXTRACTION INVOLVING HORIZONTAL HYDRAULIC FRACTURING

WHEREAS  horizontal hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as “fracking,” has been banned or placed under moratorium in several countries, three U.S. states and three Canadian provinces

WHEREAS  recent studies have revealed serious risks to public health involved at every stage of operations

WHEREAS  methane emitted by fracked wells is a potent greenhouse gas, contributing to man-made climate change

WHEREAS  Alberta’s water resources are precious and valuable

WHEREAS  there is growing concern in Alberta and a growing body of evidence of negative effects of horizontal hydraulic fracturing activities on human and animal health and air and water quality and of an increase in dangerous seismic activity

WHEREAS  agricultural production and the safety of our agricultural products will be under increasing scrutiny as our trade develops with countries where horizontal  “fracking” is not allowed

WHEREAS our reputation for environmental integrity has the potential to have a direct effect on our tourism industry

WHEREAS  Alberta municipalities require the assistance of the Province in order to fulfill their duty to protect the health and safety of their residents

 Be it resolved  that the Alberta NDP calls on the Provincial Government to:

  1. Declare a moratorium on horizontal hydraulic fracturing pending independent scientific study to determine the effects of all operations on human and animal health, and on the environment, including thorough investigation of effects on air, land and water. 
  1. Declare nondisclosure agreements in landowner contracts regarding information on effects of the technology on air, land or water to be illegal. 
  1. Remove “right of entry” legislation, which renders useless any attempt to obtain reasonable compensation for landowners. 

Economy may be improving, but many Alberta oilpatch jobs will never come back by Ian Bickis, The Canadian Press, March 1, 2017, Calgary Herald

Tens of thousands of oil and gas workers laid off during the downturn have been waiting for the patch to get back on its feet, but many of the jobs could be gone for good.

A rapid change in technology is playing out across the industry, after plummeting crude prices that began in 2015 forced companies to cut jobs and other costs wherever they could over the past two years.

Now, with oil holding steady above US$50 a barrel since December after having bottomed out to about $26 in early 2016, energy analysts say the growth of automation and other labour-saving efficiencies could hold back many jobs from returning with the economic recovery.

Take shale drilling, where just a few years ago you could find 30 rig hands operating diesel pumps, using headsets to synchronize the throttle and pressure needed to break apart the rock formations and free the trapped crude.

Today, that job can be done by two people sitting inside a control van, monitoring the automated, electrified systems, said Mark Salkeld, head of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada.

“Now on a drill rig you’ve got a driller sitting in a cyber chair, with dual joysticks, touch screens, everything instrumented. He can control the whole rig, he can see it all.”

Companies are relying more on machine learning to crunch the bewildering array of data from the field, looking for ways to improve production and lower costs, said Warren Gieck, a production optimization leader at General Electric’s innovation centre in Calgary.

“As the market is settling out and people are looking at expanding, they’re looking at expanding their projects, but not the number of people that are running them,” he said.

“They’re trying to do a lot more with a lot less,” he noted. “The personnel that are left are just overloaded and need additional tools.”

Gieck said that downturn has also accelerated the hunt for optimization because companies can’t afford to just drill extra wells like they could in the past.

The streamlined operations can be seen at Cenovus Energy (TSX:CVE), where the downturn spurred a major restructuring, says Drew Zieglgansberger, executive vice-president of oilsands manufacturing.

“We have been extremely focused over the last two years on efficiency and reducing our cost structures,” he said by email.

The efforts have resulted in faster drilling, fewer well pads and other improvements that have cut non-fuel operating costs by 30 per cent.

Those efforts have also meant that despite cutting about a third of its head count in the downturn, Zieglgansberger says they won’t need to rehire anyone to go ahead with two expansion projects a year.

Companies like Cenovus and Suncor are moving increasingly to replicated plans, rather than starting from scratch, meaning design time for projects have plummeted.

Suncor says it has slashed the engineering time for a new steam-based oilsands well pad to 800 hours for its new design, compared with about 9,100 hours between 2010 and 2015.

And companies are looking to push advancements on the more mature mining method as well, with Suncor already operating a driverless truck pilot project at its oilsands mine. Shell and Imperial (TSX:IMO) have also said they’re looking into the potential of autonomous trucks.

Salkeld said smaller companies, like those on the service side, haven’t been able to invest as much in technology because of the downturn — but with the industry picking up, so too is the push for automation.

Precision Drilling (TSX:PD) boasted in its latest quarterly results that it will be working to further the automation on its Super Triple rigs, with mechanized pipe feeding and the ability to walk itself to the next pad, while also pushing for further “de-manned” directional drilling services.

Big rigs still require a lot of workers, noted Salkeld, with some of the largest creating an estimated 300 direct and indirect jobs, but those rigs are doing the work of what some five did before.

Looking ahead, Salkeld said he sees a continued push towards robotics with a crew of two or less, both for costs and increased safety.

He said that future is already arriving, having recently seen a new type of automated rig online.

“It was a video of this massive, automotive assembly-line type, Star Wars-type robot, that was picking up the pipe, drilling it, and there wasn’t a person in sight.” [Emphasis added]

 

Jobless recovery? Technology advances replace jobs as oilpatch emerges from downturn by Ian Bickis, The Canadian Press, March 1, 2017, Calgary Herald

Tens of thousands of oil and gas workers laid off during the downturn have been waiting for the patch to get back on its feet, but many of the jobs could be gone for good.

A rapid change in technology is playing out across the industry, after plummeting crude prices that began in 2015 forced companies to cut jobs and other costs wherever they could over the past two years.

Now, with oil holding steady above US$50 a barrel since December after having bottomed out to about $26 in early 2016, energy analysts say the growth of automation and other labour-saving efficiencies could hold back many jobs from returning with the economic recovery.

Take shale drilling, where just a few years ago you could find 30 rig hands operating diesel pumps, using headsets to synchronize the throttle and pressure needed to break apart the rock formations and free the trapped crude.

Today, that job can be done by two people sitting inside a control van, monitoring the automated, electrified systems, said Mark Salkeld, head of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada.

“Now on a drill rig you’ve got a driller sitting in a cyber chair, with dual joysticks, touch screens, everything instrumented. He can control the whole rig, he can see it all.”

Companies are relying more on machine learning to crunch the bewildering array of data from the field, looking for ways to improve production and lower costs, said Warren Gieck, a production optimization leader at General Electric’s innovation centre in Calgary.

“As the market is settling out and people are looking at expanding, they’re looking at expanding their projects, but not the number of people that are running them,” he said.

“They’re trying to do a lot more with a lot less,” he noted. “The personnel that are left are just overloaded and need additional tools.”

Gieck said that downturn has also accelerated the hunt for optimization because companies can’t afford to just drill extra wells like they could in the past.

The streamlined operations can be seen at Cenovus Energy (TSX:CVE), where the downturn spurred a major restructuring, says Drew Zieglgansberger, executive vice-president of oilsands manufacturing.

“We have been extremely focused over the last two years on efficiency and reducing our cost structures,” he said by email.

The efforts have resulted in faster drilling, fewer well pads and other improvements that have cut non-fuel operating costs by 30 per cent.

Those efforts have also meant that despite cutting about a third of its head count in the downturn, Zieglgansberger says they won’t need to rehire anyone to go ahead with two expansion projects a year.

Companies like Cenovus and Suncor are moving increasingly to replicated plans, rather than starting from scratch, meaning design time for projects have plummeted.

Suncor says it has slashed the engineering time for a new steam-based oilsands well pad to 800 hours for its new design, compared with about 9,100 hours between 2010 and 2015.

And companies are looking to push advancements on the more mature mining method as well, with Suncor already operating a driverless truck pilot project at its oilsands mine. Shell and Imperial (TSX:IMO) have also said they’re looking into the potential of autonomous trucks.

Salkeld said smaller companies, like those on the service side, haven’t been able to invest as much in technology because of the downturn — but with the industry picking up, so too is the push for automation.

Precision Drilling (TSX:PD) boasted in its latest quarterly results that it will be working to further the automation on its Super Triple rigs, with mechanized pipe feeding and the ability to walk itself to the next pad, while also pushing for further “de-manned” directional drilling services.

Big rigs still require a lot of workers, noted Salkeld, with some of the largest creating an estimated 300 direct and indirect jobs, but those rigs are doing the work of what some five did before.

Looking ahead, Salkeld said he sees a continued push towards robotics with a crew of two or less, both for costs and increased safety.

He said that future is already arriving, having recently seen a new type of automated rig online.

“It was a video of this massive, automotive assembly-line type, Star Wars-type robot, that was picking up the pipe, drilling it, and there wasn’t a person in sight.”

Texas Oil Fields Rebound From Price Lull, but Jobs Are Left Behind, The industry is embracing technology and finding new ways to pare the labor force. But as jobs go away, what of presidential promises to bring them back? by Clifford Krauss, February 19, 2017, The New York Times

In the land where oil jobs were once a guaranteed road to security for blue-collar workers, Eustasio Velazquez’s career has been upended by technology.

“I don’t see a future,” Mr. Velazquez, 44, said on a recent afternoon as he stooped over his shopping cart at a local grocery store. “Pretty soon every rig will have one worker and a robot.”

Oil and gas workers have traditionally had some of the highest-paying blue-collar jobs — just the type that President Trump has vowed to preserve and bring back. But the West Texas oil fields, where activity is gearing back up as prices rebound, illustrate how difficult it will be to meet that goal. As in other industries, automation is creating a new demand for high-tech workers — sometimes hundreds of miles away in a control center — but their numbers don’t offset the ranks of field hands no longer required to sling chains and lift iron.

Several thousand workers have come back to work in recent months as the price of oil has begun to rise again, but energy experts say that between a third and a half of the workers who lost their jobs are not returning. Many have migrated to construction or even jobs in renewable energy, like wind power.

“People have left the industry, and they are not coming back,” said Michael Dynan, vice president for portfolio and strategic development at Schramm, a Pennsylvania manufacturer of drilling rigs. “If it’s a repetitive task, it can be automated, and I don’t need someone to do that. I can get a computer to do that.”

And despite all the lost workers, United States oil production is galloping upward, to nine million barrels a day from 8.6 million in September. Nationwide, with a bit more than one-third as many rigs operating as in 2014, production is not even down 10 percent from record levels.

Pioneer Natural Resources, one of the most productive West Texas producers, has slashed the number of days to drill and complete wells so drastically that it has been able to cut costs by 25 percent in wells completed since early 2015. The typical rig that drilled eight to 12 wells a year just a few years ago now drills up to 16. Last year, the company added nearly 240 wells to its Permian Basin inventory without adding new employees.

The laborious task of checking tank levels by climbing a flight of steps and popping open a series of latches, for instance, has been replaced by pressing a few icons on a computer touch screen. A fully automated water pump station installed last summer is intended to save hundreds of truck trips every day hauling water for hydraulically fracturing wells, yielding diesel and labor cost savings.

“We want to transform our work force to the point where we need to hire fewer people,” said Joey Hall, Pioneer’s executive vice president for Permian operations.

In the last two years, ABB, the Swiss technology company, has opened two plants in Houston for assembling and packaging robotics and integrating advanced instrumentation into oil field operations.

S.O.C. Industries, a small local pump truck operator and chemical services provider, is forced to invest $100,000 a year to keep up with the computer programs and monitoring equipment its clients request. The added expenses are one reason the company has let go 15 of the 60 field workers employed three years ago. Another is that well operators that once hired five or six people on a drill site to mix chemicals and drilling fluids as well as clean up spills are now hiring only three as mechanization has sliced their drilling time in half.

“A lot of the guys can’t operate these new technologies, tablets and instruments, and they keep whining,” he added. “They want to know why we can’t do things like we used to.”

That’s a good thing for Michael Manga, 34, an employee of Latshaw Drilling, an Oklahoma company active here. A college dropout, he knocked around from job to job before finding his way to the oil patch. Now, playing video games like Call of Duty and Mario Kart with his friends over the years has paid off, giving him the eye-hand coordination to monitor and operate the control panels and joy sticks that control the drilling rig.

“We do such a good job now,” he said, “we’re drilling ourselves out of a job.” [Emphasis added]

[Refer also to:

2017 02 17: BNN Interviews Alberta Oil Patch Consultant Brent Nimeck on Lexin and AER’s Orphan Wells: “This problem is 30 years in the making. … I would call it a Ponzi Scheme…. This is an orchestrated fraud from multiple angles: Industry, CAPP and the Alberta Energy Regulator have enabled this to happen. … Through our independent analysis and we’ve confirmed this at multiple sources within the energy regulator, the liabilities are over $300 billion. That’s what’s on the hook for Alberta taxpayers right now – $300 billion.”

2016 06 12: Meet Alberta’s Radioactive Ranchers: Nielle and Howard Hawkwood. Timing is everything. Why did AIMCo (ATB/Heritage Fund connected) announce $200 Million (bailout?) investment in “Quite leveraged” Calfrac on same day NDP Rural Caucus try to get Nielle Hawkwood’s frac ban resolution on floor of NDP’s Annual Convention? ]

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