RSSLiner company planning hiring spree
Liner company planning hiring spree
Inventor Allen Stein, top right, of Quick Pits LLC explains a new above ground water storage system for the oil and gas industry at the company’s site on River Road in Grand Junction. The company hopes to hire 150 employees over the next year. The demonstration pit holds about 50,000 barrels of water, or about half of its capacity.
When the family-owned Energy Services LLC roustabout company started up in 2006, it didn’t take long to expand to 83 employees amid western Colorado’s drilling boom.
“And then, of course, the rigs started moving out,” said Brock Wade, who founded the company with his partner, Keri Gray, and Wade’s father, Jestus “Shorty” Wade.
Before they knew it, the slowdown had shrunk the company’s workforce to just the three of them.
“That was a killer ... “We said, ‘Darn it, we’ve got a ways to go, we’ve got to get back there,’ ” Brock Wade said.
The company began seeking work where drilling was occurring, going first to Oklahoma. There, it became involved in plastic fluid-containment systems at rig sites. Then, it took its newly acquired knowledge to Pennsylvania, where it worked on containment systems placed beneath rigs.
The company was beginning to develop a niche. The process accelerated when employee Al Stein developed a 30-inch-high steel-frame structure that could be used to hold up the edges of plastic liners to contain spills, such as from tanks holding hydraulic fracturing fluid. It was a vast improvement over low-tech structures such as hay bales and railroad ties and became successful in the East.
“For Energy Services it was wonderful ... because we were the only ones that had it,” Gray said.
Meanwhile, Stein kept wondering why he couldn’t try the same approach with an even bigger frame.
It turns out, he could, and the result is the Quick-Pit. The system makes use of metal A-frames 10 feet high to create the outer wall of above-ground plastic-lined pits. The pits can hold from 30,000 to almost a million barrels of hydraulic fracturing and well-flowback fluids. A million barrels is equivalent to 42 million gallons.
Taking the product from concept to market rollout was slow going, requiring about 2 1/2 years, Stein said. Bob Pattillo was the engineer on the project, and he said it had to be designed to withstand pressures of 3,000 pounds per linear foot where the liner covers the A-frame.
Stein and the Energy Services owners partnered to open Quick Pits LLC last year, and it now employs more than 20 people. It’s about to begin manufacturing of the pit systems at a 28,000-square-foot plant at 2189 River Road in Grand Junction. Its goal is to get 100 of the systems leased and out in the field next year, and it expects a year from now to be employing about 150 people, many of them as welders for the A-frame systems.
That’s on top of the 180 employees now working for Energy Services, which has expanded to other states, including Ohio, Wyoming, North Dakota and Utah.
And the Quick Pits owners already have bigger plans, including for an 80,000-square-foot plant in Fruita, and plants in four other states.
Between both companies, they envision potentially employing thousands of people locally by 2015. Quick Pits will need people to transport, install and maintain its systems, as well as manufacture them.
Quick Pits’ owners believe they have a game-changer in their product. They say it’s cheaper than other above-ground water-handling systems such as tanks, and leaks are easier to detect than for in-ground pits. Those leaks would be contained by a secondary liner system.
The company says the Quick-Pit reduces permitting hurdles, can be laid out section by section in different configurations to accommodate site constraints, and its A-frame sections can be collapsed for easy trucking from site to site.
Brock Wade said Quick Pits expects to see demand for the product in places such as Texas, the East, North Dakota and Wyoming, and it is seeing interest in Colorado.
While Energy Services and its sister company are tapping many out-of-state markets, Wade said he’d like to see more drilling come back home to Colorado and especially the Piceance Basin, not so much for personal business reasons but for the sake of the state and “for jobs, for growth, for families.”
Meanwhile, Quick Pits is doing its part to contribute to the local jobs base. In the process, Stein is exceeding the considerable expectations he set for himself when he first came to Energy Services and asked to be hired.
“He said, ‘I promise I’ll make it worth your while,’ ” Gray recalls.
She added, “Al did great things for us, right from the beginning.”
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