DEPARTMENTS • PERSPECTIVES
Stephen Foster,
Scandrill: Moving
from US Army
to the oilfield
opens new career
opportunities BY STEPHEN WHITFIELD,
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
The oil and gas industry draws folks from
all walks of life to work in different disci-
plines, but when it comes to drilling, it is
the men and women working on the rig
who are the backbone of the business –
the pressure washers, the floorhands, the
motor hands and everyone else that puts
in long hours to keep a rig running.

Stephen Foster, HSE Coordinator at
Scandrill, started his drilling career as one
of those crew members working on the rig
floor. The work started out as just a steady
job – a way to support his growing family
– but this past summer it began to blossom
into a career when he moved into a new
safety role with the company. “There are so
many different routes to take in the oilfield,
so many different facets of the industry,
so many different ways to move up,” he
said. “I’ve learned that you don’t have to be
stuck at all in this industry. If you figure
out what excites you, you can move.”
Mr Foster grew up in Pineland, Texas,
a small town less than 40 miles from the
Louisiana border. Upon graduating high
school in 2009, he went straight into the
US Army and received technical training
to serve as an intelligence analyst. Over
the next eight years, he went on to serve
in campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and
peacekeeping missions in South Korea,
doing everything from military intelli-
gence to coordinating drone flights, kinetic
targeting and leading a battalion intel-
ligence section as a noncommissioned
officer. He left the Army in 2017, a result of
earlier conversations with his brother, a
54 directional driller in South Texas, about
joining the oilfield. Although Mr Foster’s
brother unexpectedly passed away before
he made the career switch, another family
connection took him to Scandrill, and he
soon began working as a floorhand on a
rig in Henderson, Texas, 40 minutes from
his home.

He recalls his first two days on the rig
as being fairly easy, but on the third day,
he started to wonder if he had made a
mistake. “We were pulling out of hole, and
it was about an 18,000-ft trip. It was wet
day, and it was overwhelming. I remember
telling my wife that I might not be cut out
for this. But she told me I had made my
decision and needed to see it through.”
Mr Foster powered through that ini-
tial rough stretch and eventually found
himself enjoying his time on the rig and
particularly the friendships he developed
with other crew members. “If you’re not
in the oilfield, you have the idea that these
are rough individuals. And, yes, they are
not people you’d want to mess with, but
they’re also the kind of people that would
give you their shirt off their back if you
didn’t have one out there,” he said.

Bridge between
management and crew
Mr Foster would go on to spend much
of the next two years working floors for
Scandrill rigs. That was followed by a
brief stint as a motor hand and two more
years as a derrick hand in East Texas,
Oklahoma and West Texas. In mid-2022,
he took a new role with Scandrill as HSE
Coordinator when he realized that it was
an opportunity “to do something that can
make a difference in the bigger picture.”
He now primarily focuses on incident
management – analyzing incidents on
a rig site, updating procedures to help
prevent those incidents from happening
again, and communicating those proce-
dures to the personnel on the floor. In
effect, he serves as a bridge between man-
agement and the rig crews, something he
can do well because of his years working
on the floor.

“I understand exactly what those floor-
hands are going through and what they’re
trying to accomplish. A lot of times, the
accidents that happen are just due to their
‘go-get-it” nature. They’re trying to get a
Stephen Foster is applying the knowl-
edge he gained working on the rig floor
to his new position as Scandrill’s HSE
Coordinator. Knowing how floorhands
think and what drives their decision
making helps him to have more effec-
tive conversations around safety.

job done, so they’ll push a little harder, a
litter further, maybe cut a corner. I can
approach them knowing why they made
the decisions that they made and explain
why that decision isn’t the best one to
make,” he said.

His new position also afforded him an
opportunity to get involved with IADC.

Under an IADC program that provides a
complimentary registration to the Annual
General Meeting to a young professional
working for a drilling contractor member
company, Mr Foster attended the 2022
conference in New Orleans. He not only
got the chance to hear industry executives
talk about challenges and opportunities
within the industry, but he also got the
chance to engage with many of them.

The experience has encouraged him to
get more involved with IADC in the future,
he said, and it has inspired him to continue
working his way up the ladder.

“At first I felt like a fly in the milk bowl
with all these influential people, but as
I got to talking to them, I saw that they
were all just normal people doing a job,”
he said. “There were people there that I
got to meet who I admired on a personal
level because they started on the rig floor
and worked their way up to influential
positions both in their companies and the
industry. That’s something I was able to
see myself doing.” DC
JAN UARY/FEB RUARY 2023 • D R I LLI N G CO N T R ACTO R