No beards allowed: Drilling sites pack shaving kits just in case
“Write a story about my beard,” Eric Madia called out from his booth at Hart Energy’s Marcellus-Utica Midstream conference last month. It was a slow news day. Mr. Madia ran his fingers along the wiry tuft on his cheeks and chin. Only then, looking around the convention center exhibit hall, did he suddenly appear out of place. Nearly all the other attendees — mostly men — were clean shaven. What about your beard, I asked. “He wouldn’t be allowed on a Noble site,” said Jeff Eldredge, Mr. Madia’s boss at Utah-based Pro Fire Energy, whose trim goatee also would disqualify him on a drilling operation run by Texasbased Noble Energy Inc. Why not? Maybe because it’s flammable, Mr. Madia guessed. Or maybe because if there’s a chemical release of some sort, you need a tight seal for a respirator mask and a beard would surely get in the way. Yes, that’s it, the men agreed. Mr. Madia, a sales manager with the oil and gas service firm and self-described “oilfield extraordinaire,” can vividly recall the feeling of crappy razors on his skin during a visit to a Chesapeake Energy well site some years ago.
His beard was mostly scruff at that point, Mr. Madia said. A sign at the well site said that all visitors must be clean shaven, so he was handed a kit.
Really, “It wasn’t much of a kit,” he said. “It was a couple of cheap disposable Bic razors and a little travel size shaving cream. And a sink.”
Mr. Madia said he took it like a pro. “Work before beard,” he said. It’s generally up to a company to dictate facial hair policy for people on well pads, said Wayne Vanderhoof, president of RJR Safety Inc. in Claysville.
The main concern is making sure a respirator mask can form a tight seal around the face. And the most common reason to need a respirator on oil and gas well sites is if the drilling operation encounters a pocket of toxic gas such as hydrogen sulfide.
That’s why Canonsburg-based Rice Energy — before it was bought by Downtown-based EQT Corp. — had a no-beard policy at all of its Utica Shale well sites, Mr. Vanderhoof said. EQT also has a clean-shaven policy.
Large operators, especially multinationals, might have no-beard policies even in areas where there is no hydrogen sulfide risk — perhaps for standardization purposes, he said.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s guidelines for respirator seals used to single out beards as no-nos, but were later revised to say that any hair that interferes with the seal is not permitted.
That means certain mustaches and sideburns would be OK, the agency wrote in a 2016 letter to an Air Force employee who asked the agency if it would be permitted to
sport a “neatly trimmed goatee.”
Outfitting oil and gas workers with respirators, too, is at the discretion of each company, Mr. Vanderhoof said.
A number of other industries limit facial hair for health and safety reasons: underground coal mining, chemical plants, the military.
A famous case in 1984 pitted a Sikh employee of Chevron Corp. against the company, which demoted him from his machinist job for refusing to shave his beard. The court found that Chevron was within its rights to do so because the beard would have compromised a respirator seal and violated OSHA standards.
Now, there are certain hoods that can be used in lieu of standard respirators that would accommodate such situations, Mr. Vanderhoof said, though he has never seen one in the oil and gas fields in Appalachia.