Brock Yordy:

Good morning. Welcome to episode 145 of The Driller Newscast, your update on all things impacting, innovating, inspiring news policy, your way to stay informed with the drilling and construction community. I'm your host, Brock Yordy, and this week in the news I had an awesome opportunity to sit down with our editor, Johnny Oldani, at the BNP headquarters Newsroom. Johnny was in from Colorado. I headed over to Birmingham, Michigan to meet up with them. We had a great time talking about what's impacting the industry and why you should be involved in contributing your knowledge, your stories, your professionalism to The Driller. For this week's feature, we're starting part one of the 21st century driller. Part one is titled The Demand, and we're going to talk about the demand for the drilling community right now and why we need to ramp up. And that frankly comes down to there's 160 million Americans that work every day and only 8.25 million of them work construction. And as we drill into those numbers, only 1% are drillers. So, as we look at what we need from the DOE Liftoff Report, what we need for rare earth mining, for oil and gas, for hot-rock geothermal, where do we fall? Let's jump into the news and this great week.

Welcome to The Driller Newscast. What's going on right now? This is February. I have caught up with Johnny Oldani, our editor of The Driller. Johnny has now been with us almost four months and we have had lots of time to look into stories, look into pieces of the industry, that insight that we can get, those opportunities to share knowledge, to talk about what's bottlenecking or blocking or what's promoting us. And we're going to take some time right now to talk about what the heck is going on in the industry, and what the new perspective of our editor is. 

And I'll start this right off with asking Johnny: So it's been four months, you went through the National Groundwater Conference, you have a baby at home, and this drilling industry has never been that easy on families and growing and stuff, and there's so much going on. So I'll let you choose first. How do you balance the baby at home and all of this changing news, or how has it changed from when you started to now you have a priority that is much greater than just the water industry?

Johnny Oldani:

Yeah, well, I mean, thankfully, the sporadic hours have kind of helped dealing with a newborn. Sometimes you're up at all hours of the night and then yeah, you look on the news while you're dealing with a crying baby and it's like, oh man, this news just broke. So I feel like I've actually got a leg up in terms of just how much stuff going on, just kind of seeing the breaking news happen at hours I normally wouldn't be up, which is kind of interesting. But just in general, balancing the news, I mean, there's been so much going on that it's a lot to take in, but I think it's just kind of nice for me. There's so much sporadic-ness going on that, I dunno, I'm just kind of able to digest it all in a crazy manic way. And it's helped open my eyes to just the complexity of the industry and just the complexity of the different organizations like the EPA and things that have an effect on it and how important it all is, especially now being a father, seeing why these things matter, why environmental protection matters. And it gives me a different perspective on things. At least my long-winded way of saying it.

Brock Yordy:

Yeah, you talk about breaking and just in the past few weeks we have seen in the city of Detroit, a water main broke and froze.

Johnny Oldani:

It looks like The Day After Tomorrow, literally. I mean they're frozen and it's insane.

Brock Yordy:

And as we talk about stories, it's wild to think about the average age of our water infrastructure right now is about 80 to a hundred years. And so we go, "Whoa, how did this water main break?" Or "Whoa, why is this water treatment plant so concerned about the point of entry for removing PFAS right now?" And it's because it was 1925 when it was put into place as the most sophisticated system possible. And we've done slow incremental upgrades, but it's tough because the price of clean water is priceless. If you look at other countries and we look at cholera, outbreaks of dysentery or some of the things, we see when we look at two out of three people in the world have a cell phone and one out of three people in the world don't have access to clean water. That has a big reason why COVID impacted some of these developing countries. And then you see Detroit a water main break and we can see Flint just north of Detroit and the water crisis we had there, that was about water infrastructure. 

Johnny Oldani:

It's so weird because as a Michigander, you're from a state with the most fresh water in the country and it's like, "Oh, you think we have it all locked down?" And then that's when you start to get into the drilling industry. That's when you realize how disconnected and connected everything is in weird ways where it's like, you think we're good? We're not going to have any issues from an outsider perspective in my previous life where it's like we have so much fresh water, we're the Great Lakes State. But then you look at this infrastructure in a deeper way and you look at the policies that affect the different types of infrastructure and just the decisions politicians make in Flint and stuff like that, like you mentioned. And you just start to realize how complex it all is. And it's not just as simple as, oh, let's just go take a cup to Lake Michigan and drink out of it. It's way deeper than that. It's the infrastructure we have under us and just how outdated all that is. And it's pretty terrifying.

Brock Yordy:

And as we look at Flint or there's a big discussion on environmental justice communities and Flint falls into that, and I know this is a taboo subject throughout the country right now, but we're going to jump down to Alabama where there was a story that broke that a directional drilling company intersected an aquifer that was a fractured zone and it pumped enough water out of that horizontal borehole that 10 wells went dry. And as we look at Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana, they are some very water-stressed states with very poor water infrastructure without the Great Lakes. So when you look at water being removed from the ground there, we have saltwater intrusion, which means we have more impact on groundwater. And I know you got a chance to listen to some experts and stuff. And what were your thoughts on Alabama?

Johnny Oldani:

So again, from me not being a geologist and knowing the deep intricacies of drilling in terms of the geology of things, talking to actual geologists who kind of break it down in simple ways, like they say, essentially that situation was you poke a hole in the bottom of McDonald's cup and eventually it all flows out. But that to me is just like, how does that even happen? But then the way they explained it is there's things like subsurface investigations and things like that where it's like you don't realize how much goes into that from an outsider perspective. And that's why getting deep into this industry has kind of really opened my eyes in terms of, again, the complexity of it all and just how much is unknown about even these professionals poking a hole in something and essentially draining the water of a whole community. It's stuff like that. It's so fragile and it's terrifying, but that's kind of where passion comes in. Like how do drillers figure out these problems and avoid these problems?

Brock Yordy:

And so this week we've just talked about water impacts. And we talk about the discovery or the investigation of the subsurface, and we have scientists for that and we have the science community and we have the drilling and the construction community and then we have the editorial community and telling that story are all of the pieces. And so we could jump into geothermal or construction right now, but instead as you've been talking to individuals about cultivating into columnists or telling their story or getting more science behind it, what do you need right now at The Driller to be able to grow our ability to give the best news and information and promote our industry appropriately?

Johnny Oldani:

At the end of the day, we need contributors. I can do my research, talk to people in the drilling community of all walks of life from people in the EPA and just organizations and the government to actual drillers who are boots on the ground. And I want to tell more of those stories through actually hearing from people. Like I said, boots on the ground. That's the most important thing I'm looking for. I want to help drillers and people in the industry tell their story instead of me just kind of relaying that information. I want them to tell their story. So the more contributors, the better. We've in the past week talked to two geologists that have different perspectives on things, female drillers who have their own perspective on things in a generally male-dominated industry. And I love those stories as a journalist and essentially those types of stories.

Brock Yordy:

And we need a good balance. We need to tell the story. We need to show that the DOE Liftoff Report just said that there's 18,000 drillers across the United States. And so you start looking at that piece of it. But we also need the technical aspect. So we need the stories and what's important to our hearts, but we also need what's really important for us and our minds to be able to promote where we're going next. And so that as Johnny is an amazing storyteller and excited to be able to get in the middle of this at the same time, I need you to be talking about why you developed your solids control unit the way you did, why you're running dual tube flooded, reverse over air hammers. There's so much that we need to share, that needs to happen before you're gone. And our tribalism is only as strong as the faintest ink. And right now faint ink is a joke, right? Because we have the cloud that possibly could be here forever.

Johnny Oldani:

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, again, I like your phrase of "tribal knowledge." We have all these drillers with so much experience in different types of things, but that generation will eventually not be here. So yeah, like you said, telling those stories, the technical stories are also just as important to kind of have a really good balance of editorial content where it's telling those deep stories and the feature stories that people love to talk about and that are very important. But then you also have the technical things that are just as important just in its own way. 

Brock Yordy:

And we're going to leave you with this driller, better driller, better sciences professional, better geologist, better hydrogeologist, better engineer, better client, better American, that understands the impacts to where our science information goes as we're defining our subsurface and understanding groundwater to rare earth minerals to power generation. We're a better industry that can then influence local, state, and national government by being those who can relay our information appropriately. And that's what we need to get a better driller. Better. Okay. Thanks, everybody.

For this week's feature, this is part one, the demand for the 21st-century driller. And as we've seen from the expectations and the ramp up of 2024 of all the projects that were out there across the country, and as we look at the opportunities we have in the drilling industry right now, the ground-source industry is just one piece of all the available jobs for a skilled driller.

And as we've just seen the Department of Energy Liftoff Report come out and talk about the workforce, or as we watch the water and wastewater industry talk about workforce and that we have an aged workforce, the average age of a construction professional right now in the United States is about 55. The average age of a driller, which we've been saying for the past four years, is older than that, 58 in reality; that 55 years old came pre-2019. So we could easily say the average age of a construction worker and driller is beyond 58. And here we have the youngest of the millennials and Gen Z coming into our industry and ready to work. And what are they looking for? They're looking for that family-sustaining career right now. As we look at the construction playing field as the numbers fluctuate, we know that there's 8.25 million Americans that work in construction every day out of 160 million Americans who work every day.

That is a big thing to think that a half a percent of our working population works in construction. Of course, we have an issue with blue collar jobs and trades. We just saw Mike Rowe make a big comment about it at CPAC and the fact that we just have a generation that doesn't know how to work and we told 'em all to go to college. Here's the deal. Professional development comes in many different forms, and I want you to consider that opportunity to go from high school to a two-year degree or a four-year degree and be in a classroom amongst peers from many different walks of life, many different perspectives, many different cultures and countries. Higher learning is about being part of a community and understanding how to collaborate and understand. Sometimes your idea isn't the best idea or maybe your idea is the best idea, and you get the confidence by being built up amongst your peers.

So as we take that back into the drilling industry with this demand where we can see oil and gas ramping back up for all the opportunities to drill, to be a driller, to be a roughneck, to be the worm, to be the mud logger, to be the mud mixer, to mining of rare earth minerals and lithium mining and the ramp, there is a demand that is vast, including construction drilling, including just qualified operators to run construction equipment. We see apprenticeship programs popping up across the country that are non-union, that are non-joint, that are just specific to a company including drilling companies, signing up and getting approval. Why do we have apprenticeship programs to develop the right individual to stay within our industry? And that comes from the demand and that comes from the pay that we expect out of that demand. And so as we look at the Liftoff Report, this is what was stated, you can go to page 33 of the report, and this is a great resource of what's happening in 2025 because 2024, we promised lots of projects and many took off, and then we had a degree of uncertainty and we know of right now, geothermal is in the realm of continuing of promoting.

We see it from the Department of Energy to the Department of Interior to the president. There's lots of drilling to be done. We hear that statement, drill, baby drill. And again, I want us to get back to driller, better driller. Why? Because we have to pick up and teach and develop and grow. And so as we see statements like this from the Liftoff Report, the workforce supporting geothermal heating and cooling is composed of diverse occupations. While occupational skills are transferable, there may be high competition for labor and they get into discussing the Bureau of Labor Statistics and what is required of these key occupations and the training requirements and the skills that are transferable with other skills and applications. It continues to state in many cases the training talent and skills required to install ground source heat pump and equipment are similar to those needed for standard HVAC installations, and that's talking about our electricians and our plumbers and our HVAC professionals.

But what is really holding us back right now is adding in drilling and ground loop installation, which impacts our production and our professionalism. It says these drilling methods required to install water wells or gas pipelines and perform environmental monitoring, construction drilling are all the same skills. And as we look at what it takes to get there, this is where we have to get to driller, better driller. And why do I continue to state driller better driller? Because the professional world out there, that other 95% of the working class has been conditioned by us to believe that the only way to train drillers is through tribalism, boots on the ground, getting muddy, and there is very much truth to that. But unlike exploration, mining on the side of a mountain or what is required to make water come out of the ground, ground-source geothermal loops, we have repetition, we have muscle memory.

We can develop drilling programs. There will always be issues out there, situations that could impact how we are successful onsite, but what we really need to consider is how do we take that new driller, that new professional and give them the confidence to continue to make decisions so that we stop saying that it takes two years of an apprentice program to get somebody capable of drilling In two years, they should be competent of leading and being able to make good decisions on their own, but before that, we should be able to get them out there supervised and productive. What is that going to take? That's going to take a little bit of risk on your side as a company, but with standard operating procedures, the best safety protocols, thinking about all the considerations that come into there, the opportunity is no different than what we see in oil and gas, construction drilling, horizontal directional, mining.

They've just done a better job of onboarding from going to Pella, Iowa to a school on horizontal drilling, to heading down to Houston, Texas, to any of the big companies providing drilling fluid schools to solids control. How do we develop the professionals we need in-house and then have them professionally develop outside of that? And that's being involved with the International Ground Source Heat Pump Association. If we're running into hot rocks and we're going west of the Mississippi, we should be thinking about how we partner up with the geothermal rising group? There's so much here. There's the IADC, the International Drilling Contractors Association.

We have an opportunity to lift our professionalism, to meet this demand, to compete against those individuals going and running forklifts at warehouses, distributing little brown boxes with smiley faces on 'em. There's so many pieces here that we have to do better, and it comes back to breaking the stigma of posting on LinkedIn or on any social media or in your elevator pitch that my company's the best company because I have 50 years of experience standing on the platforms. We're not always going to have that as we ramp to 80 million homes, which is what the liftoff talks about for us to be able to make our 2050 goals. So you know what that's going to take? That's going to take 25,000 drill rigs, each rig drilling 600 holes a year roughly for the next 25 years, and we're already behind as we see those numbers that talk about 18,000 drillers or 12,000 drillers, or as we've talked many about, the industrial drilling professionals being right around that 14,000 number.

We got to train, baby train. We got to stop the siloing. We have to understand the demand here and the development opportunities. We have lots of great associations out there that are professionally developed, talking about what we need for regulations, and what we can do better. Now it's back to driller, better driller, professional, better professional. How do we make this a family-sustaining career? And that's what we're going to talk about next week. The development. How do we go from demand to development? It's a lot to think about. Go out, find those right individuals, get 'em trained up within company and outside company. We can do this industry. Thank you for joining us for episode 145. It was great getting to sit down with Johnny, spend some time collaborating, thinking about all that we want to get involved with in 2025 for the drilling community. For the construction community, this week's feature is part one, the demand.

Next week we're going to jump into the development of the 21st-century driller. We really need to start thinking about our professional presence and how we create a family-sustaining career in drilling. It's no longer the days that we have months and years to develop new drillers. We need to get 'em on the platform. We need to get 'em coached. We need to get them thinking about the standard operating procedures and how we should react. We got to get into driller, better driller, and that's exactly what it's going to take. Check out thedriller.com for all the latest content and contributions. It's a good time to be in the drilling industry. Have a safe and productive week.