The Crude Life engages with industry experts and energy enthusiasts every day with interviews, radio programs, and podcasts. These conversations range from CEOs to truck drivers to authors to engineers to cafe owners. Just like our diverse experts and interviews, the conversations have depth and worldly experience.
Here’s a look at some quotes and comments from those Living the Crude Life with the coronavirus impact and COVID-19 Shutdown.
“We’re staying positive. We’ve all gone through a restructuring at Knight Energy. We’re running lean and mean and poised to help all the operators that are going to stay in it. They are going to have the rental equipment and services that they need at an affordable price with partners and everything. There’s no place on U.S. land we can’t be to help them out. Any operator can look to us and say, “I need your services more than ever,” because so many vendors are taking a hit and can’t help anymore.”
– Matt Hill, Knight Energy
“We’ve stayed open through this as our retail is deemed essential in industry. Obviously, we have seen the number of people walking through decrease, but we’ve also positioned our company in a way people can order online at BeckerSafety.com. People can come pick it up or they can have it shipped to their door.”
– Devin Becker, Becker Safety
“Not much has changed. It’s definitely a different vibe than it was. My main field business is a short haul waste water company. We pick up water from wells and haul it to disposal wells. Number one, that can’t stop because, if that stops, oilfield production [stops] and that is a whole different conversation. We work with most of the players in the STACK and central Oklahoma [and that] is where we are with water hauling.”
– Brandon Davis, Swan Energy
“Most of our office staff is working from home. I have been working from the office as has our outside salesman Dave. We’ve got things pretty mobile these days so parts of our business transitioned and adapted quite easily. This is one of our busiest times of the year, and I am not going to say it’s not busy; a lot of our bigger jobs have been pushed back. We usually ramp up this time of year and hire more staff, and we kind of shy away from that and, looking back now, we shouldn’t have because we got busy. I had to jump in the other day and sandblast for five-and-a-half hours. We probably should have hired then and still may because we have some business on the books.”
– Aaron Jordan, Black Water Environmental
“I am sitting here in the Swanny (NDSU) Bison man cave office with my two bulldogs behind me. We’ll call them my new associates. Here in my basement,
I have all my papers stacked up, my laptop, my cell, and [am] trying to do business in the best way we all are with the COVID-19 shutdown and coronavirus impacts. Before our interview here, I spoke with a few attorneys in the oil and gas industry from producers this week and whether it was an attorney from Hess or wherever, they are all experiencing the same thing.”
– Josh Swanson, Vogel Law Firm
“What I am seeing is massive frustration with the entire thing. I believe everyone has gotten a little taste of socialism, whether they admit that or not or understand that or not; they’re saying that they do not like this one bit. Every state is doing this a little different, but the one thing they are consistent about it going overboard. For example, our governor today is saying you can go back out on the golf courses. Excuse me? Why the heck couldn’t we go on the golf course to begin with?”
– Tom Shepstone, NaturalGasNow
“I have a lot of invoices that I am waiting on to get paid so I applied for some CARES Act assistance. For me this would have been a big boost and relief for at least a couple months. Then I saw your post about people getting left out and I went and investigated this. Low and behold, I see that email sitting in my inbox from SBA and it felt like nothing short of a bait and switch.”
– Thomas Funderburk, Lone Star Geoservices
The Crude Life Podcast can be heard Monday through Thursday with a Week in Review every Friday.
Jason Spiess is a multimedia journalist, entrepreneur and content consultant. Spiess has over 25 years of media experience in broadcasting, journalism, reporting and principal ownership in media companies. (Over 30 years experience if you count his adolescent years as a newspaper delivery boy learning the importance and logistics of daily distribution and monthly door-to-door bill collecting.) Spiess has worked in the areas of oil and gas, UAS and precision agriculture, health care, cannabis, agriculture, real estate, government affairs and economic development. Spiess is the host of two radio programs, Building the Bakken and Coffee & Capitalism, and three specialty programs, MonDak OilField Review, Corporate Ink and UnStuck, that carry a radio network that spans five states and two countries. Spiess is a North Dakota native and graduated from North Dakota State University.
- Jason Spiesshttps://energiesmedia.com/author/jason-spiess/
- Jason Spiesshttps://energiesmedia.com/author/jason-spiess/
- Jason Spiesshttps://energiesmedia.com/author/jason-spiess/
- Jason Spiesshttps://energiesmedia.com/author/jason-spiess/
- Jason Spiesshttps://energiesmedia.com/author/jason-spiess/
- Jason Spiesshttps://energiesmedia.com/author/jason-spiess/
Oil and gas operations are commonly found in remote locations far from company headquarters. Now, it's possible to monitor pump operations, collate and analyze seismic data, and track employees around the world from almost anywhere. Whether employees are in the office or in the field, the internet and related applications enable a greater multidirectional flow of information – and control – than ever before.