Vets find a buddy in gas industry

Company responses to those who served include a program to hire and train.

STEVE MOCARSKY smocarsky@timesleader.com

The natural gas drilling industry on Thursday seized the opportunity of the celebration of Veterans Day to thank veterans for their service and tout the employment opportunities the industry is providing to veterans after their military service ends.

“Today, we thank our veterans for their service and for keeping our homeland safe. Transitioning from the battlefield to civilian life can be challenging, especially during one of the deepest economic downturns in our nation’s history,” Kathryn Klaber, president and executive director of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, said in a press release.

Fortunately, as Marcellus Shale development expands, so do job opportunities for veterans, Klaber said.

One company that actively recruits veterans for gas industry work is Chesapeake Energy.

The company employs 36 former junior military officers (lieutenants or captains) and more than 100 former servicemen who joined the company through Troops 2 Roughnecks – a private company that trains enlisted personnel for employment on drill rigs, said company spokesman Rory Sweeney.

Jason Chilson, 23, of Towanda, is a graduate of the Troops 2 Roughnecks program. Having enlisted out of high school and served a deployment to Iraq with the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines, based in Camp Lejeune, N.C., Chilson now works as a floor hand with Nomac Drilling, a subsidiary of Chesapeake.

“I basically do maintenance around the rig, trip pipe – when there’s a problem down the hole and we have to change the drill head, we pull the pipe out of the hole and fix the problem,” Chilson said in a phone interview.

The military paid for Chilson’s rig training, which began a few months before his four-year commitment ended in June.

He was hired by Chesapeake in July.

“I love my job. It’s something different every day. I like the (schedule), the stability. It’s a big industry and it’s right here,” Chilson said, explaining that he works two weeks straight and then has two weeks off, a typical schedule for roughnecks – the industry term for rig workers.

Owego, N.Y., resident Andrew Bischoff served two overseas tours of duty as a captain in the U.S. Army – as a combat engineer platoon leader in Iraq in 2003-04 and as a media relations officer in Afghanistan in 2006-2007.

He now uses many of his military skills as a field facilities engineer at Chesapeake’s Appalachia Midstream Services subsidiary in Big Flats, N.Y., to analyze maps, interact with landowners throughout Pennsylvania and ultimately route pipelines from wellheads in the Northern Tier to their connection with the large interstate pipelines.

“One of the greatest things about the military is they train you to be fluid – to quickly adapt to a new strategy, move forward and motivate others. Chesapeake recognizes the value of those skills and puts a premium on attracting the military personnel who possess them,” Bischoff said.

“The culture, the environment, the mentality of the people who work at Chesapeake are in line with who I am. The basic qualities of respecting people and doing the right thing – I still hold those core Army values and so does Chesapeake,” he said.

Kip Welch, director of recruitment for Chesapeake, said the company’s military recruiting initiative has proven to be more successful than expected.

Buck