Highest Paying Natural Gas Drilling Jobs
Natural gas drilling jobs are becoming hot again as prices rise and more rigs go back to work in areas like the Marcellus Shale Formation and the Haynesville Shale play. So, which jobs in natural gas drilling offer the highest pay?
Basically the highest paying jobs on a drilling rig, be it for oil or natural gas, are from the top at company man or consultant down the ladder to toolpusher, driller, floor hands and roustabouts.
Scattered in with these jobs are specialty jobs performed by outside personnel called or service companies. Service companies like Baker Hughes, Weatherford, Halliburton, Smith and others perform specialized services that the rig is not capable of handling on it’s own.
Oilfield Consultant or Company Man
Most often the highest paid person on an oil and gas rig location is the company man or consultant. This is usually a person (still most often male) who is in charge of every aspect of drilling the well. They may be in constant contact with senior engineers who are employees of the oil company by phone and e-mail. A satellite link up may display the activity of the rig in every detail, including depth, weight on bit, rotary speed and other factors, to multiple engineers in faraway offices. They may have much of they may have much of the decision making control, with the consultant on location merely there to make sure their orders are complied with. A company man may have a decade or more of experience, often two or three times this, and make as much as $1000.000 a day or more.
It is a stressful and demanding job where many years of experience are rewarded with compensation.
Directional Driller
Most natural gas wells in areas like the Barnett shale or Marcellus shale utilize a technology called horizontal drilling. A service company such as Baker Hughes will come in and rig up specialized equipment that is able to drill horizontally. This job requires oilfield smarts as well as book knowledge in the form of trigonometry and computer skills. Directional drillers are the elite of oilfield drillers and are in high demand. Salaries for a directional driller may run over $250,000.00 a year. They may be the second highest paid oilfield workers on the rig location besides the company man or consultant who represents the energy company such as Chesapeake or XTO. The directional driller may be an engineering graduate who worked for a time in LWD or logging while drilling or may have started as a roughneck and worked his way up to the spot of driller, then gone to school to learn the complex math and programs used in directional drilling. Both avenues to this job are commonplace. It is a stressful job and if the slightest mistake in calculation is made the well could cross into another owner’s property, resulting in multi-million dollar lawsuits.
Well Logging and LWD
Perhaps the third highest paying jobs in natural gas drilling are in well logging and real time well logging known and LWD or logging while drilling. Wireline well logging used sophisticated equipment that may contain a radioactive source to in effect “x-ray” the rock formation or gamma sensors that pick up traces of radiation from rocks like shale to indicate where in geological time and place the drill bit is located. Well logging engineers of both kinds may be graduates of an engineering program with degrees in Mechanical, Chemical, or Petroleum Engineering. Salaries of well logging and LWD technicians are generally over $100,000.00 per year.
Stresses of the job include being away from home and “on call” almost all year long. A well logging employee may be away from home over 20 + days a month.
Mud Engineer
Another high paying job in oil and gas exploration is that of a mud engineer. These employees may have a background or degree in chemistry and their job is to stay on the rig site and make sure that the mud, or drilling fluids, are kept up to the proper weight specifications and properties. Properly formulated drilling fluid is essential to keep the hole intact and the drill bit and assembly from getting stuck. A mud engineer for one of the major companies like Halliburton may make well over $100,000.00 a year. Downsides of this oilfield job are the need to be accurate and precise in testing mud samples and being at fault if a multi-million dollar oil or gas well is lost due to bad mud properties. The job requires constant travel and being away from home for weeks at a time. Benefits and retirement are good.
On the rig site these are typically the highest paying jobs in natural gas drilling. There are other specialty jobs, such as “oilfield fisherman” who are experienced at recovering lost objects in the well bore. These highly specialized individuals may have years of oilfield experience and fetch over $1000.00 a day when on the job.
There is a reason why many of these jobs pay so well. What is expected of the employees is near perfection %100 of the time.
As the famous oilfield fire fighter Red Adair once said “If you think hiring an professional is expensive, try hiring an amateur”.
For more information on the kinds of oilfield jobs see: The Kinds Of Oilfield Jobs For job listings see Texas Oilfield Job.com
