By Adriana Christianson

Work for some oil employees drying up in Saskatchewan

Feb 4, 2015 | 11:14 AM

People who work in Saskatchewan’s oil patch are starting to feel the pinch of lower oil prices as capital spending cuts by major oil companies start to trickle down to companies contracted to drill and maintain oil wells.

Tyler Phelps has been working as a driller on oil rigs around Weyburn for the past seven years. He said when oil prices started dropping significantly, he started getting fewer calls.

“There’s still work. It’s just really slow,” Phelps commented.

Off the top of his head, he can think of up to 50 guys who are out of work right now. That doesn’t mean they’re officially laid off, but they only get called for a few days in a month. He hasn’t been called to work on a drill site since early January and he has friends who haven’t worked since before Christmas.

Fortunately, Phelps managed to find another job in the oil patch right away — working on a steam truck for a hydro-vac company.

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“I got a couple buddies that work drilling rigs that are just trying to fill in here and there,” he commented. “So they’ll come work on the service side. That’s where I work so they’ll call me and say, ‘Hey do you guys need a hand?’”

The job is still linked to the oil industry but because it is on the service side, Phelps considers the work to be a bit more stable than working on drilling rigs right now.

“They’re always going to need to service the wells that break down on the service side, so that’s a perk to the service rigs,” he said, noting that wells already in production still need to be maintained regularly.

Geoff Davidson was recently laid off from his job working on a picker truck for an oilfield maintenance company in Estevan.

“Essentially I was told that I wasn’t the only person that wouldn’t be coming back to the oil patch,” Davidson commented.

He had to take some time off from manual labour after an emergency appendectomy before Christmas. When he called his boss to ask when he could start again, he was told the company had already laid off one fifth of the employees within a span of two weeks.

“Basically I was told if I could find just about any other job down in south Saskatchewan, that I should take it and then let everybody else know that they should get on with that same company,” Davidson said.

He says the mood around the oil patch is split with some people very optimistic that the price of oil will bounce back soon and others saying the slump could last for years.

At 19, Davidson said he’s not sure what to believe right now but he is reconsidering whether or not his future career should be in the oil industry.

The Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors is forecasting a 41 per cent decline in well drilling activity for 2015 compared to 2014. Derek Fildebrandt is the vice-president of communications for the association.

“We’re expecting to see a potential 45 per cent drop in the number of active workers on the job over 2014,” said Fildebrandt.

“In terms of direct jobs, we’re expecting up to up to 3,300 jobs to be lost.”

Fildebrandt explains every active rig has about 20 people working directly on the drilling rig and in the office. An additional 115 people may be employed indirectly to work on a drill site as environmental and geological consultants, plus service contractors and maintenance workers to name a few.

“That puts up to 19,000 indirect jobs at risk,” Fildebrandt said.

“Between direct and indirect jobs at risk right now we’re looking at 22,500 jobs across Western Canada. It’s very significant. That doesn’t mean those jobs will be lost but those jobs are at risk.”

The Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors does not provide a provincial break down for these numbers because the contracting companies that provide the employment information are often integrated across borders with employees working in different provinces.

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