The Wall Street Journal published this account detailing the challenges of finding a qualified labour force when it comes to shale gas exploration:

If Poland is to develop its reserves of shale gas, the material that has created an energy bonanza in the U.S., one of its biggest obstacles is likely to be securing a qualified labor force, industry participants say.

“There are about 1,000 shale jobs in Poland right now, but there will be 50,000 to 100,000 in the next 10 years,” says Jakub Kostecki, chief executive of New Gas Contracting, a Warsaw recruiting firm.

Wieslaw Prugar, chief executive of Orlen Upstream, cites a “qualified” labor force as one of the serious challenges Poland will need to address to develop its unconventional natural-gas reserves and has called the issue a “bottleneck.” Orlen Upstream is a subsidiary of state-controlled refiner PKN Orlen SA (PKN.WA).

Poland has recoverable shale-gas resources of 5.3 trillion cubic meters, equal to more than 300 years of the country’s annual natural-gas consumption, the U.S. Department of Energy says in a report.

While testing is still being conducted on Poland’s shale rock–which lies about four kilometers underground in a belt running from the Gdansk area of northern Poland diagonally southeast to the country’s border with Ukraine–results so far already have whetted the appetite of energy companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), Chevron Corp. (CVX), Marathon Oil Corp. (MRO) and Talisman Energy Inc. (TLM.T TLM)–which have acquired exploration concessions–as well as oil-field-services giants such as Halliburton Co. (HAL), Schlumberger Ltd. (SLB), Baker Hughes Inc. (BHI) and Weatherford International Ltd. (WFT), which hope to work for them.

But before Poland can collect any windfall hydrocarbon profits and free itself from dependence on Russia for its natural-gas supply, it needs to address a number of obstacles, including acquiring drilling equipment and pipeline infrastructure to take the natural gas to customers around Poland and abroad and, above all, labor.

Outside the U.S., Poland is the first place where companies are making a serious effort to develop shale gas.

“It’s easy to find work nowadays,” says Waclaw Klimek, a student at Akademia Gorniczno-Hutnicza, a Polish technical university known for its mining and oil and natural-gas specializations.

“In two years, the boom will really start, just as we’ll be finishing up school,” adds Marta Cyz, another AGH student, who with Klimek was manning the registration desk at the second International Geosciences Student Conference in Krakow, which doubled as a job fair.

Shale oil and natural gas are little different from their conventional counterparts, being produced by the same processes. The major difference is that conventional oil and gas deposits are the result of the fossil fuel pooling in an impermeable basin or bubble of rock, while shale deposits are still trapped in the sponge-like semipermeable rock itself. While conventional drilling seeks to tap an underground pool, shale deposits involve the fracturing of underground rock to release these deposits.

“We know there is gas,” says Kamlesh Parmar, the country manager of Lane Energy, a company specializing in exploring for unconventional hydrocarbon sources and the furthest advanced among companies exploring for shale gas in Poland. “The question now is: How much is there, what is the quality, can we get it out and how much will it cost?”

To extract the volumes cited in the U.S. Department of Energy report, tens of thousands of production wells would need to be drilled in Poland, says Niall Rowantree, an upstream research analyst at Wood Mackenzie in Edinburgh. Only a handful have been drilled so far.

Recruiters are already actively in touch with Poles working in oil towns across the world, in Houston; Aberdeen, Scotland; Calgary, Alberta; and in Norway to persuade them to move back to Poland, Kostecki says. Some have been away for 30 years.

Meanwhile, Polish natural-gas monopoly PGNiG SA, which for decades was the only game in town if one wanted to work in oil-and-gas extraction in Poland, now has a poaching problem.

“Geofizyka Torun, [a PGNiG subsidiary] took everyone who applied [this year],” says Piotr Kurnik, the coordinator of the AGH conference and a third-year student at AGH.

The company is looking for surveyors and project operators, as well as title negotiators, who get the owners of concessioned land to allow companies to conduct their seismic readings on their property, whether through a sale of the land, a lease or some other arrangement. While Poland’s government owns the rights to all the minerals under Polish territory, it doesn’t own the land itself. Dealing sometimes with thousands of individual landholders means title negotiation over an area to be explored or exploited often moves at a snail’s pace.

Business is picking up, but Geofizyka Torun is facing increasing competition as rival companies set up shop in Poland, bringing their own equipment to do seismic testing and hiring young professionals, says Sylwia Kowalska, a human-resources director at the company. But Geofizyka Torun offers to pay for its employees’ lodgings and provides them with English classes, she says.

“We’re seeing employees who left coming back,” Kowalska says. “They miss Poland.” She estimates that in May the company hired at least 70% more people than a year ago.

Geofizyka Krakow, another PGNiG subsidiary, does subcontracting jobs all over the world and recruits oil and gas workers in many different countries, including Pakistan, Egypt and Canada. But one of its toughest tasks is hiring people in Poland itself, says Filip Rieger, Geofizyka Krakow’s chief recruitment coordinator. Those conducting mining-related work need permits from the State Mining Authority to do so. These permits are awarded for different grades of expertise, depending on age, experience and education. “In Poland, the required permits limit the pool of applicants,” Rieger says.

Meanwhile, Chevron’s Polish operations will “require scaling up” if initial drilling results are positive, but the company isn’t currently experiencing labor shortages, says John Claussen, Chevron Upstream Europe’s Poland country manager.

“We are aware there are good universities turning out promising graduates and we have already hired four new engineers in-country to help meet our own internal needs,” Claussen says.

Source: Wall Street Journal