Shale reps offer biz tips

MATT HUGHES

mhughes@timesleader.com

SCRANTON – The offers tremendous economic opportunity for local small business owners, representatives of the Marcellus Shale Coalition said Thursday, but opportunity doesn’t always knock at one’s door. Business owners need to go knocking.

Josh Young of Range Resources speaks Thursday at the Marcellus Shale business conference at the Hilton Hotel in Scranton.

Niko J. Kallianiotis/for the times leader

At a meeting with local business leaders held Thursday at the Hilton Hotel, representatives from the natural gas drilling and pipeline industries offered advice on how to tap the well of opportunity offered by the shale gas industry. About 100 people attended the event, which was co-hosted by gas-industry advocacy group Marcellus Shale Coalition, the state Department of Community and Economic Development, the Northeastern Pennsylvania Industrial Resource Center and the Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce.

Marcellus Shale Coalition President Kathryn Klaber encouraged existing business seeking to service the gas industry to “think about where your skill sets are that we need and certainly would rather have locally than sourced from afar.”

Klaber said “100 years of gas” lies trapped in shale formations beneath Pennsylvania and that extracting it is “not something that happens for two years and then shuts down. We’ll be around for decades.”

She noted suppliers of aggregate materials and construction equipment for well site preparation, trucking and logistics companies, railroads and cement manufacturers as just a few of the industries gas drillers rely on for contract and subcontract work.

Josh Young, of gas driller and Marcellus Shale Coalition founding member Range Resources, said his company partners with more than 100 contractors and subcontractors throughout the drilling process, from land and gas rights acquisition through site restoration after drilling is complete.

Chris McCue, of Borton-Lawson, called his Wilkes-Barre-based environmental engineering firm a “story of a local company that’s been able to get involved in the (Marcellus Shale) play that didn’t have experience prior to the play developing.”

McCue said development of the Marcellus Shale has given Borton-Lawson “a resume that we didn’t have a year and a half ago and helped the firm hire 35 employees since January, 20 of them directly linked to the drilling industry, and open branch offices in Towanda and Pittsburgh.

McCue said, however, that Borton-Lawson needed to aggressively pursue opportunities to work with drillers, a process that involved making trips to Oklahoma to meet with drilling companies based there.

“You can’t sit there and wait for the phone to ring,” McCue said. “You have to go out and find the work. … They’re not necessarily looking for the biggest companies. They’re not looking for the name brand,” McCue said. “They’re looking for somebody they can pick up the phone and call and know that (a project) is going to get done.”

“You just have to figure out where your void is, do your research and stick with it,” he added.

At least one in attendance felt the gas industry is not going far enough to reach out to local companies and laborers, however.

Rick Schraeder, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union Local 81, Scranton, said gas companies are often difficult to track down and have already commenced operations by the time local job seekers hear about opportunities, and that he doesn’t think “some of the local people have the resources to go to Oklahoma” in search or work or contracts.

“We hear that we need to be pro-active and that we have to go out and knock on the door,” Schraeder said. “We want to know where the door is.”