Published: San Antonio Business Journal
By: Sanford Nowlin
Date: July 8, 2011

Since opening offices here last fall to chase business in the booming Eagle Ford Shale, Chesapeake Energy has more than quadrupled its area workforce.

The Oklahoma City-based natural gas company — which once had 100 employees sprinkled across San Antonio and the shale — now has 100 in the Alamo City alone. Another 40 now work in Carrizo Springs, 60 in Pearsall and more than 240 across its South Texas drilling rigs.

And it’s still hiring.

“Our employment still may double over the long term, but I don’t think you’ll continue to see the same kind of exponential growth you saw up to this point,” spokesman Silver Vasquez says. “We’ll be growing for the next few years, just not at the same rate.”

Chesapeake is one of many firms chasing opportunity in the Eagle Ford, a 24-county oil and gas play that curls across South Texas. Much of the economic development is expected to spill into San Antonio, the nearest large city.

Local economic development officials say the growth of companies like Chesapeake is significant because the exapansion primarily is achieved through local hires.

“Almost all of these companies are saying that they’re not moving a lot of people down here,” says David Marquez, executive director of the Bexar County Economic Development Department. “They have experienced people elsewhere, but they need them in the various shale plays around the country. This is a significant change for our area, in terms of finding local people to fill this many jobs.”

According to a recent University of Texas at San Antonio study, the shale supports 12,600 full-time jobs. That number is expected to grow to nearly 68,000 by 2020.

Job diversity

Chesapeake currently has 21 rigs running across the Eagle Ford Shale and expects to hit 30 by year end. Over the longer term, it will have about 40 in operation.

Most of the workers in Chesapeake’s San Antonio office, located 4350 Lockhill-Selma Road, perform planning, engineering and right-of-way functions needed to support drilling across its South Texas properties. Its Carrizo Springs office primarily houses drilling and operations personnel, while its Pearsall office provides a variety of oil-field services.

Vasquez says the firm also is creating a number of jobs with contracting firms that provide services to its rigs, from maintenance work to water deliveries. About 100 security personnel guard its facilities across the shale, for example, through the company’s contract with Illinois-based Tricor Security Group Inc.

“We’re not just creating a drilling jobs through our company and its subsidiaries,” Vasquez says. “We’re also indirectly creating even more jobs that support what we’re doing on the rigs every day.”

Chesapeake lists job openings on its Web site (www.chk.com). At press time, there were almost 20 specific to the Eagle Ford Shale.

“Jobs are being added, posted and taken off daily,” Vasquez says. “We get thousands of résumés a day.”