SRC Energy Services (AES) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and has provided service to the energy industry for more than forty years. AES’s oil field services range from asset management, drilling, and remediation to staffing, equipment and maintenance, construction, and environmental consulting. Over its forty years, AES has received a number of awards for excellence.
Since becoming the subsidiary’s president and CEO in 2018, Christine Resler has expanded AES beyond its core business areas and, at the same time, created a culture that fosters the innovation for which the company has become known. “When I walked in the door in 2018, we had a great core team,” says Resler, “and we’ve grown from there in a natural way.” That expansion of services has had two key components: a culture where people feel free to speak about their ideas and a look at both the present and future of energy.
In 2019, more than 1,000 employees took part in a year-long effort to define the company’s business culture. “We made the decision that we really wanted our teams to understand who and what we are,” notes Resler. The company uses the acronym ASPIRE to describe the values and purposes participants identified, which include Absolute integrity, Safety, People first, Iñupiat heritage, Resilient family, and Exceptional service quality. Company workers take those values with them everywhere they go.
And AES walks the walk with programs like “Excellence in Action,” where employees are free to send Resler an email about something great that happened in the field. “I always send a personal note to an employee to thank them,” says Resler. “It creates a culture where people want to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do.”
Finally, the company fosters a learning culture rather than one that blames. The company regularly plans “Hazard Hunts,” where teams look at incidents or near misses and submit a presentation with their solution to the issue. A small panel of judges, including a client representative, decide on the most effective solutions, which are then distributed to the field.
The second part involved the company looking at opportunities in Alaska that align with its expertise—or where it could gain expertise: things like coiled tubing, plugging and abandoning old wells, and the installation of facilities. “There was room for another North Slope construction company,” says Resler. “We also had bid on some really interesting work, and winning that work allowed us to have an infrastructure of people and do well design and planning and plug and abandonment work.”
The third part of the plan was diversification: “We’re supporting more organizations that are outside of oil and gas,” says Resler. An example of this is the company’s expansion into environmental remediation, specifically PFAS.
ASRC Energy Services
ASRC Energy Services
ASRC Energy Services
ASRC Energy Services
Soil and water remediation isn’t the only way AES is involved in innovative technologies. AES sees opportunity in the shift toward lower carbon emissions. “Wanting to get a picture of the landscape for our clients, many of whom have set their own goals to lower their emissions, we began to delve deeply into these topics because we wanted to be prepared,” says AES project manager Esther Tempel.
AES has been part of a working group that put together a framework for legislation on carbon management in Alaska. The company also applied for carbon capture-related grants, as captured carbon can be injected into wells to help with oil and gas production.
The company also won a grant to test compressed natural gas vehicles in Deadhorse—a less carbon-intensive fossil fuel because it comes out of the ground locally and doesn’t need to be refined and shipped. “We’re in the beginning of this and have just purchased the vehicles,” Tempel says. “If successful, there’s a potential to deploy it on the North Slope and maybe even in some of our communities there. Alaska is uniquely situated because many of our communities are not connected to a central grid, so we can test sustainable energy systems on a micro grid system, and that might be able to replace some of the fuel sources in our remote communities.”
Finally, AES has been looking into developing a methane monitoring, detection, measurement, and reporting service line for clients because the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of the Interior have both proposed new rules concerning reduction of methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. Although these emissions are in some cases substantially lower in Alaska than in other states, it’s still something the company’s clients will have to look at. “I think one of the interesting components to Alaska and the North Slope is that we are surrounded by seasonally thawing permafrost, which is a known methane emitter,” says Tempel. “This can be monitored by drones, planes, and ground sensors, and we’re setting up a business to advise on that measurement.”
It is exactly this diversification and innovation that will position AES for a prosperous future. “We want to be at the table with our existing facilities and provide operations and maintenance. We want to help the [oil and gas] industry in Alaska be successful, and that’s our core,” says Resler, “but we also want to support the transition. When we said we wanted to be the Arctic technologies solution provider in 2018, it was aspirational. But we’ve really passed the aspirational part and moved into it being real.”