rian Benson has spent more than forty years working with Alaska’s oil and gas industry. As the Alaska area Vice President of Airgas, an Air Liquide America company, he has seen some major ups and downs in the industry.

“Some of the largest growth we saw was during the pipeline days,” he says. “Then we had some contraction, and then more growth, and then some contraction during the 2008 period when the country went through recession, and then steady growth until Alaska went through our recession here about three years ago.”

The latest recession occurred after oil prices plummeted in 2014, erasing nearly 6,500 jobs and $680 million in wages, according to a 2017 study by the McDowell Group commissioned by the Alaska Oil and Gas Association.

Benson is seeing signs of a brighter future.

“We’re starting to see some exciting growth,” he says. “I don’t want to be political, but the government has changed. It has become more business-friendly, so the players up on the Slope are starting to get busy with work that has been on the books for two or three years. And we’re seeing growth within the North Slope as exploration plays westward into the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.”

That’s good news for the thousands of people who work for the hundreds of companies that keep Alaska’s oil and gas industry up and running. Oil and gas provides the lion’s share of revenue for the state. The industry also is responsible for about one in six jobs in the private sector, or about $13.2 billion in wages, according to McDowell Group.

Alaska’s North Slope is remote by nearly any definition. Only one road—mostly two-lane, unpaved, steep, and winding in places—leads to the sprawling oil and gas operations that spread out from a hub at Deadhorse. Barges operate in a narrow window when ice recedes in the Beaufort Sea each summer, and blizzards often delay air travel to and from the region. But the North Slope, along with oil and gas operations on the Kenai Peninsula and Cook Inlet, is the economic lifeblood for Alaska. The oil and gas services industry helps keep that blood pumping.

While the big oil and gas companies and the trans-Alaska pipeline directly employed 4,275 workers in 2016, oil and gas support businesses employed 6,095, according to the McDowell Group study.

Thousands of people work on the Slope. Not only do they need the equipment and tools to do their jobs, they also need transportation, housing, food, and other amenities. These are supplied by companies such as Doyon Drilling, which is manufacturing its ninth state-of-the-art drill rig for use in the oilfields; Airgas, which supplies safety equipment and bulk gases such as nitrogen for well stimulation; and Alaska Roteq, which distributes industrial pumps and machine specialty parts.

Other companies provide food, housekeeping, and janitorial services, among many, many other services. According to the study, the hundreds of oil and gas support vendors supply about $4.6 billion in operating and capital expenditures.

Airgas employs about sixty-five families in Alaska and has been in the state since 1952, initially as Anchorage Oxygen and later as Industrial Air Products. It took on the Air Liquide America banner in 1972 and in 2016 integrated with Airgas. Its main offices, along with its air separation and cylinder packaging plant, are located in Anchorage, with stores and warehouses in Wasilla, Homer, Kenai, and Fairbanks. About a third of its business is with the oil and gas industry and another third is medical, Benson says. The rest is a mix of service, retail, and construction.

The westward expansion of exploration on the North Slope by companies such as ConocoPhillips and Oil Search is providing a lot of growth opportunities, Benson says.

In 2017-2018, ConocoPhillips had one of its busiest exploration seasons in more than a decade as it drilled several wells to help delineate its Willow discovery, which is estimated to hold at least 300 million barrels of recoverable oil. In 2015, a partnership by Repsol and Armstrong Energy announced it discovered a billion-plus-barrel prospect they named Pikka.

“In my career, I’ve seen some $120 oil drop to like $30, and when that happens, things just kind of button up,” Benson says. “There’s a certain amount of work that needs to be done, maintenance that can’t be put off. But the growth of infrastructure, that doesn’t happen unless there’s some stability. I think that the oil companies are seeing some stability, or potential stability, in our tax regime up here. We’re seeing investment that frankly is pretty exciting.”

In 2016, ConocoPhillips announced it was teaming up with Doyon Drilling to build a state-of-the-art extended-reach drilling rig for its Fiord West field, located northwest of the Colville River Delta. The rig will be able to drill 33,000 feet and access resources in a 125-square-mile area around the rig from ConocoPhillips’ existing infrastructure. It is expected to go online in 2020, with about eighty direct jobs and another seventy to eighty support jobs, according to Aaron Schutt, president of Doyon, Limited.

Doyon Drilling currently operates eight drilling rigs on the North Slope and has about 300 employees. Its highly mobile rigs are designed for the North Slope’s extreme arctic conditions. In 2018, its Rig 19 set a North American drilling record when it drilled a horizontal lateral well 21,478 feet long at ConocoPhillips’ CD-5 site.

Coming up with the next best idea is the biggest challenge when working with oil and gas companies, says Kevin Laurin, president of Alaska Roteq. Based in Wasilla, Alaska Roteq provides full machining services, thermal spray coating, welding, balancing, field machining, field mechanics, and engineering. The company also specializes in pump repair and is a statewide distributor for products such as pumps, air compressors, mechanical seals, valves, and instrumentation. It employs about thirty people.

“We play in every market there is when it comes to our distribution,” Laurin says. “I don’t care if it’s the villages with small little water pumps or it’s the North Slope with big 5,000-horsepower injection pumps. We cover it all.”

The company opened its doors in 1993 as BW/IP, which became FlowServe, a global pump manufacturer. In 2001, the company bought the facility from FlowServe and became Alaska Roteq, Laurin says. In the nearly thirty years he’s been with the company, Laurin says the industry has gotten tighter, especially with the downturn after 2014.

“There’s a lot more competition out there from a machine shop standpoint, well, from every standpoint of what we do,” he says. “Way less people doing the same amount of work and way more hierarchy to get things approved. Money doesn’t flow as easily as it used to. There’s a lot more scrutinizing to make sure that the money needs to be spent.”

Diversification is crucial to the company’s success. Laurin says about half of Alaska Roteq’s business is through its shop, which does specialty welding, coatings, machining, and grinding. Product distribution makes up the other half.

“For the distribution, it’s statewide,” he says. “We play in the water-wastewater world. We play in mining. We play in all the markets. From the shop standpoint, it’s mainly North Slope business and some mining.”

One challenge for Alaska Roteq has been finding ways to upgrade injection pumps so they keep working in the North Slope’s harsh conditions.

“We’ve done years and years and years of upgrades and upgrades and upgrades and finding the next weak link,” Laurin says. “You spend a lot of effort to make the pump run longer, and then the next time they want to run longer yet. So you’ve got to come up with new ideas to make it run longer.”

It’s never boring, he says. “It’s always challenging to come up with the next best idea.”

Laurin says the oil and gas industry has recovered enough to be on par with where it stood before the price collapse, and the future is looking promising.

“Because there’s more competition than there’s ever been, I would say we’ve got concerns there, but as a whole, I don’t think the purse strings are being held quite as tight as what they were,” he says. “I think there’s going to be some money cut loose for projects. Obviously, with ConocoPhillips moving forward with new exploration and Eni spending money … BP looks like they’re probably going to spend some money this year. The future definitely looks promising.”

When Air Liquide moved under the Airgas umbrella, it opened up new avenues of business for the company, Benson says. The company provides bulk liquid nitrogen and oxygen from its Anchorage facilities. It also manufactures dry ice and ice pellets, which it ships statewide. Airgas is also a major supplier of safety equipment, one of the top two or three in the country, Benson says. Even that, however, is affected by what happens on the North Slope.

“The thing I’ve noticed in my time here is that when there’s nothing going on up north, all business contracts,” he says. “Even our medical [business] shrinks when we’re not selling a lot to the explorers or pipeline builders because people are putting off that trip to grandma’s house or putting off elective surgery. The whole economy is shrinking in relation to oil sales. That’s kind of a barometer, and we expect as the oil business comes up, the rising tide is going to float more boats. It’s going to help people eat out more, so they’re going to buy more CO2 for their sodas at McDonald’s.”

It’s not just the oil industry that has Benson bullish about the future. Major mineral prospects at Donlin Creek, Pebble, the Ambler mining district, and even rare earth minerals in Southeast Alaska are big opportunities for Alaskans, he says.

“It’s an exciting time to be a person who works for Airgas and an exciting time for me as an Alaskan,” Benson says. “I’ve been up here since 1955 and I’ve seen a lot of changes, but the way the state’s going right now and the opportunities that we have as a company and the opportunities that are there for our clients in the oil and gas industry, it’s just exciting. I haven’t seen anything like this really since before the trans-Alaska pipeline started. And I can see it’s not going to get as crazy as that, which is a good thing. Everything is a lot better planned this time.”