Lackawanna College Gets New Virtual Well Control Training System
The Lackawanna College School of Petroleum & Natural Gas is one of the country’s premier petroleum technology programs. It’s located not far from the border of New York State–in New Milford (Susquehanna County), PA. Lackawanna’s program is one of perhaps half a dozen such programs in the entire country. It fills a need to train oilfield and midstream workers for highly technical, skilled positions. Like running compressor stations, or running drill rigs. The Lackawanna program is a two-year program which sits nicely between a four-year year petroleum engineering degree on one side, and the trades, like welding or being a roustabout on the other side. Last year Cabot Oil & Gas made an eye-popping $2.5 million grant to the college (see Cabot Oil & Gas Does it Again – $2.5 Million Gift to Lackawanna College). A new $150,000 grant from the State of Pennsylvania has just been announced that will bring a state-of-the-art virtual training system for well control to Lackawanna…
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We’re passing along a bit of gossip–we call it gossip because we haven’t (yet) been able to verify it, but we believe it to be true. A long-time MDN reader wrote to tell us that he services most of the rigs operating in the Appalachian basin (Marcellus/Utica), and that Southwestern either has or is about to idle two rigs owned and operated by Precision Drilling in northeast PA: Rigs #538 and #539 in Bradford and Susquehanna counties. According to our source, the Bradford County rig was idled last week and the Susquehanna County rig will be idled this week. We don’t know if Southwestern has any remaining active rigs in northeastern PA owned by other companies.
This is not an easy story to write. It’s about employment in the Marcellus Shale industry–and about age discrimination. Until late last year, by all accounts the Marcellus Shale industry was, from a jobs perspective, going great guns. Yes, sometimes it was/is necessary to import workers from other states to handle specialized jobs. But increasingly the jobs have been going to local workers and not out-of-staters. Yesterday we received a heartfelt letter (below) from an MDN subscriber. This gentleman is a mechanical engineer with degrees from Penn State and Lafayette College. He has loads of experience in a variety of areas–engineering, contracting, even running a small business. He wants to get involved with the greatest industry on the planet–the Marcellus Shale energy industry. He can paper every room in his house with the number of resumes and job applications he’s filled out. He’s applied for everything from technician to field hand to roustabout (he’s physically fit). In the last five years that he’s been trying, he hasn’t been called for a single interview. Not one. He’s now 52 years old. We don’t like calling attention to stories like this one, but MDN doesn’t shy away from sharing the “bad news” about our beloved industry along with the overwhelming good news…
Seems like it was ages ago now that we told you (and keep telling you) about a rural school district in northeastern Pennsylvania–the Elk Lake School District–that drilled two Marcellus Shale wells on the school campus (see 
As we’ve been saying for some time, WPX Energy, the spun off but totally independent exploration & production company that was once part of midstream giant Williams, has been looking to exit the Marcellus stage left (see