BY BRENDAN GIBBONS
Times-Shamrock Writer

It’s a normal Wednesday at Lackawanna College’s School of Petroleum and Natural Gas, where students listen to Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. employees deliver a guest lecture on mud.

Mud is more than dirt and water.

The drilling fluid used to tap into the Marcellus Shale lubricates the drill bit as it bites through rock layers. It circulates chunks of drill cuttings back to the surface and keeps pockets of gas from blowing up out of the well with powerful force, they explain.

“It’s kind of like blood in the body; you can’t really do anything without mud,” Cabot field supervisor Charles Welker says.

The roughly 30 students in the room listen intently, with no side conversations or sneaky fooling around on the Web. Some wear hats and shirts bearing Cabot or Williams logos, mementos of their summer internships that in some cases have spilled over into part-time employment during the semester. One student parked his DTE Energy company truck in the parking lot before heading into class.

A large portion of students enrolled here come from Northern Tier counties. They’ve come to gather job training and internships that will hopefully lead to employment in a high-paying industry.

Their classroom looks more like a machine shop. Stacks of pipes, engines and valves surround them. They will use this equipment in the field. Like the guest lecturers, it was donated by the gas industry.

Cabot became Lackawanna College’s most well-known benefactor after it presented the college with $2.5 million last year, $1 million as an endowment, but others have contributed, too. Companies like Williams, Talisman Energy Inc., Exterran Holdings Inc., and Team Oil Tools have also donated practice equipment students use to hone their skills.

Over the past eight years, this close partnership with the gas industry has transformed this school from a tiny degree program at a 100-year-old community college to a two-year school that next August will accept roughly 165 new students.

“We actually see the oil and gas industry as our customer,” said founding dean Rick Marquardt, a Clarks Summit native who worked for decades as a petroleum engineer before coming out of semi-retirement to run the school. “We react to what they need,” he said.

The school now offers four associate degrees: general petroleum and natural gas technology, compression, petroleum and natural gas measurement and business administration.

Talks with oil and gas companies led them to develop a special niche — a two-year program that falls between a vocational technology school teaching engine mechanics, for example, and a full four-year petroleum engineering program.

“That little box between there, that’s what we fill,” Marquardt said.

He credits the college’s president Mark Volk, chief academic officer Jill Murray, Ph.D., vice president Erica Barone-Pricci, Ph.D., and former president Ray Angeli for taking the risk of starting the school in 2007, when only a few wells had tapped the Marcellus Shale in Northeast Pennsylvania.

“They just did it because they had a vision that oil and gas was going to be a market segment that could provide great opportunities for our local young people,” he said.

That’s not a marketing ploy that might come true someday. Three students from Susquehanna County described how it’s happening for them right now.
Josh Rowe grew up on a dairy farm near Hallstead. He says his family has worked the land there for 200 years. He didn’t know what he wanted to do after graduation but heard about Lackawanna College’s local program from other students at his high school.

He’s a second-year student now, still working for Williams after a summer internship where he learned to help operate a compressor station.

He says his favorite part of his studies is applying his classroom knowledge to what he sees around him. To the untrained eye, well pads, pipelines and compressor stations look like an inscrutable tangle of pipes, stacks, vents, tanks and engines. The equipment now makes sense to him, and he can explain it to others.

Sue Gumble is a single mother from Hop Bottom and one of the older students at Cabot’s mud lecture. She sits up straight, listens attentively and takes notes.
She recalls being nervous when gas companies moved into the region and drilled wells around her, but she also remembers the difficulty of finding jobs anywhere closer than Binghamton or Scranton. “You had to travel,” she says. “There were no opportunities around here.”

Her first year at Lackawanna earned her a summer internship with Pittston Twp.-based contractor Linde Corp., working in the safety division in gas-producing counties. The company builds well pads and pipelines for the large gas companies.

“They were putting equipment on there but none of the workers had any idea what any of it meant,” she said.

She did, thanks to her courses in gas systems.

“You find people coming to you asking you all kinds of questions,” she says. She says the company asked her to pass on what she learned to others and offered to keep her on after the summer, but she decided to focus on her courses and her child during the semester.

Montrose native Sierra Robinson returned to her hometown after earning a bachelor’s in psychology. She sits next to Gumble in the lecture.

Robinson witnessed the drilling rigs poking out of once sleepy farm fields on desolate roads packed with water tanker trucks and wanted to learn more about this controversial industry.

“I had no idea what was going on here and I obviously at the time was against it because I had this idea they were ruining the environment and my town,” she says.

After finding an ad for the college in the local newspaper, she enrolled to learn more about the industry. Her psychology degree also wasn’t doing much for her. “I could make more money cooking, which is what I did all through college, than I can with a bachelor’s degree in psychology,” she says.

What she found was a program that forced her to work harder than she did before.

“You can’t come with the intention of screwing off. You really need to be focused,” she says.

Marquardt credits the instructors and administrators for developing a rigorous program where each course builds on the next. Many are semi-retired petroleum, chemical, safety or mechanical engineers.

They’re people like Jeannine Barrett, an Elmhurst Twp. native who left a petrochemical engineering job with DuPont and Co. in Delaware to teach courses and manage the general degree program.

She describes how they teach systemic problem solving. Lecturers often introduce scientific theories and concepts, then immediately ask students to apply them to oil and gas equipment.

“You’re better able to troubleshoot if you understand the theories behind what you’re doing,” she says. The goal is to get beyond, “If A, turn B. If B, turn C.”
She also connects her work to the national and global energy landscape that’s shifting as the Marcellus becomes a world-class shale gas play.

“I personally am so energized to be a person from Northeast Pennsylvania to have an industry… where we have an innate product that’s going to provide us with so much more than what’s just here in Susquehanna County,” she says.

The question for the future is how Lackawanna College will adapt to a fast-changing industry that often runs in boom-and-bust cycles. Persistently low oil and gas prices, along with redundancy-creating mergers like the one between Baker Hughes and Halliburton, make the job market less attractive than even a few years ago. Globally, energy companies have cut more than 100,000 jobs, Bloomberg Business reported in February.

Marquardt says the age demographics of the industry will work to Lackawanna graduates’ advantage. Few companies were hiring in the years between the decline of American conventional oil and gas in the 1980s and the rise of shale energy in the early 2000s, he says.

“There’s a tremendous shortage in technician-technologist job description,” he says, adding that companies are eager to hire recently trained technicians familiar with current technologies.

“We’re working hard to just make sure we can deliver those tools they want,” he said.