Marcellus Shale Jobs – How Does $55K a Year Starting Wage for a 19 Year-Old Grab You?

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New JobsNew high paying jobs are being created, right now, in the Marcellus Shale—that is, where drilling is happening. Here’s an example from Pleasant Gap, PA:

This time last year, Eric Klinger, 19, made his living delivering pizzas. His friend Matt Bartholomew, 20, worked in a factory that manufactured pharmaceutical products.

Now, after a six-month course, they work for Halliburton, driving trucks, hauling supplies and doing some manual labor at natural gas drilling sites. They both started at salaries of between $45,000 and $55,000 a year—higher than the wages of most Pennsylvanians, according to U.S. census data.*

A 2009 study by Penn College says it takes more that 150 jobs to drill a single well. Some of those jobs are manual labor, some are highly skilled, requiring years of education and experience:

[T]he study says 4 percent of Marcellus Shale jobs are for lawyers, 3 percent are for engineers and 3 percent are for geologists.*

*The Free Lance-Star (Feb 7) – Pennsylvania workers finding a future in gas drilling

6 Comments

  1. And after six months, when the job ends, what will Mr. Klinger do? Go back to delivering pizzas? Or leave the area and move to Texas to find steadier employment? Any way you look at it, it’s only temporary. And when the O&G companies pack up and leave, capping the wells with cement and abandoning them, we will all be left with the longterm consequences, as the cement slowly cracks over decades…

  2. whoopee; their won;t be any potable water and the land will be toxic but hey, someone will have had a job for a few years! I guess drinking water is not high on the list for gas drillers since they are injecting billions of gallons of toxic waste water into the substrata.

  3. Actually we could easily stay drilling in PA for the next 15 years. There are literally thousands of places to drill and you can drill as many as 8 wells on each drilling pad. So trust me people employed by the “O&G companies” will have steady employment for years to come.

  4. HHMMM.. IS THIS WHY THEY STOPED DRILLING SO MUCH HERE IN NORTH TEXAS BECAUSE OF THE WATER SITUATION???