To call recent events at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs a “scandal” would be kind. First, veterans and civilians alike reeled upon discovering the vast backlog of veterans’ medical claims. More recently, deception regarding waiting lists at many VA hospitals across the nation shocked the public, and led to the resignation of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki this past May.

“Accessing the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs may be a veteran’s most serious challenge to getting benefits and services there,” says Jim Lyall, a veteran of the Vietnam War and associate director for the Tulsa-based Community Service Council.

Where do these events leave the veterans of U.S. armed services, especially those in Oklahoma, a state that is home to one of the highest populations of veterans and National Guardsmen in the nation?[pullquote]“Approximately 20 percent of returning service members reportedly are returning with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), another 20 percent with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and many with physical injuries.”[/pullquote]

“No state has deployed more soldiers per capita than Oklahoma,” says Carla Tanner, senior planner for the Community Service Council. “More than 63 percent of the National Guard has been deployed, either to Iraq or Afghanistan; over a third of those have been deployed multiple times. These National Guard or reservists often are faced with issues quite different from the ‘active duty’ soldiers. They leave and return, often without many of their co-workers, neighbors or friends recognizing that they left. When they return, they must fight for their jobs and reintegrate into their community without the supports that active-duty installations provide. Thus, they have an intense feeling of isolation. Their families lack the support they would usually receive at military installations.”

Regardless of the vehicle through which a veteran serves, none return from a conflict unchanged, she says.

“Approximately 20 percent of returning service members reportedly are returning with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), another 20 percent with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and many with physical injuries. The returning vets report struggles with finding jobs, behavioral health issues, family struggles and feelings of severe hypervigilance, isolation and homelessness,” Tanner says.

For many soldiers who have returned from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, their homecoming offers little relief. Despite a staggering array of addictions, mental illness and trauma, they often loathe seeking treatment.

 “In Oklahoma, a major challenge that veterans and the community must address is the aftermath of the multiple deployments of the Oklahoma National Guard and reservists,” says Rose Ewing, planning director of the Tulsa County Veterans Treatment Court. “Many of these veterans suffer with issues of PTSD, TBI and other mental health challenges, including depressive disorders and suicidal ideation. Many veterans live and breathe the warrior’s ethos of ‘don’t show weakness, don’t ask for help, don’t admit you’re struggling.’ To deal with these symptoms, many veterans turn to alcohol and drugs to manage.”

Veterans face many other problems.

“Many veterans cannot manage being exposed to large crowds, loud noises or unexpected movements due to their combat experience. This leads to many adjustment issues and creates difficulty in domestic situations and maintaining employment,” Ewing adds.

Negative perceptions of seeking help often keep veterans from asking for it.

“A huge barrier for veterans needing behavioral health help is the stigma that exists,” Tanner says. “They fear that having a record of receiving behavioral health services will keep them from furthering their military career or hinder their ability to develop a career in the police or fire departments.”

With the advent of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, new oil wells are going up around the state at a record pace and with a rhythm that harkens back to Oklahoma’s original oil boom. Sitting behind those new technologies are dozens of others. Manufacturers and service providers are hustling to stay ahead of the curve.

“In this day and age, information is not what’s important. It’s more about how you process it. We’ve got more information than we know what to do with,” says Thomas Hill, vice president of business development for Oklahoma City’s Kimray Inc.[pullquote]“I’ve got 800 employees. If I can get them thinking about the same thing and give them the tools and the opportunity to change process, then I’ve got a million ideas to work with.”[/pullquote]

The 800-person company manufactures control equipment – valves, thermostats and the like – for the energy industry. The evolution of recovery and storage in the industry requires Kimray to stay on the bleeding edge.

Technology is not the only thing that changes quickly. Regulations can change at the drop of a political hat, too.

“We can move quickly if the industry changes or if environmental regulations change. We’re able to adapt our products to meet those needs,” says Sheri Vanhooser, vice president of sales and business development for Compressco, a manufacturing company that offers wellhead compression and other services that facilitate oil and gas recovery.

The company has found a way to help its customers stay compliant with EPA regulations while also making it more profitable for the client company by increasing its productivity. Among other services, the company offers vapor recovery for storage tanks, driving up its clients’ profits by capturing natural gas that otherwise would go to waste and sending it to the sales line.

Compressco operates its own manufacturing facilities. And while it maintains its headquarters in Oklahoma City, the majority of its employees are in the field with the company’s customers at locations around the world. Close contact with customers is key.

Kimray shares a similar viewpoint.

“The way we stay on top is with our relationships with our customers,” says Hill. “We’re in the field with our customers daily. We talk with them about what they’re doing and the challenges they face. We like to be right there helping them apply our products at the same time, looking at whether there are nuances that need to be developed or changed to help them meet their needs.”

Staying current means keeping its employees up to date, as well.

“I’m absolutely sold on training and educating our employee base,” says Hill. “I’ve got 800 employees. If I can get them thinking about the same thing and give them the tools and the opportunity to change process, then I’ve got a million ideas to work with. And most of them are good.”

This story is part of an Oklahoma Energy Special Report. Continue reading additional stories from the report below.

• Oklahoma’s Energy
• Managing The Moving Parts
• The Alternatives
• Energy On The Brain

Fifteen years ago, movers and shakers wondered what the next engine of Oklahoma commerce would be. Oil and gas reservoirs were tapping out, and wind power wasn’t advanced enough to pick up the slack. Small, independent oil and gas producers started falling out of the market.

Then along came horizontal drilling.

“The industry has dramatically changed from what it was. We drill horizontal wells almost exclusively now. If you tell someone you want to drill a vertical well, they look at you like you’ve taken leave of your senses,” says Kim Hatfield, CEO of Oklahoma City’s Crawley Petroleum.[pullquote]“The big challenges for us are, first, keeping up with technology. Second, this is a terribly capital-intensive game. All of this horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing is wonderfully effective but horribly expensive.” [/pullquote]

Hatfield runs a successful independent oil and gas production business. The company employs 43 and sports the culture of a family-run enterprise. It’s no Exxon-Mobile or British Petroleum, but that’s by design. Hatfield, like other small, independent producers, likes doing things his way. And he’s good at it.

Being an independent producer doesn’t necessarily mean being small in impact. But the average independent

producer employs only 14 people, according to testimony delivered to the U.S. Congress in 2013 by Robert Sullivan, chairman of the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association and CEO of Sullivan and Company.

With fewer people, resources and less capital to spread around, independent producers specialize, focusing entirely on the “upstream” side of the business: Finding and getting oil out of the ground any way they can. They’re behind 95 percent of the wells operated in the U.S., and they account for 68 percent of domestic production.

Sullivan is eager to share the numbers that independent producers put on the boards year after year. As the chairman of the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association, he shared them with Congress on a few occasions. Independents account for more than three percent of the total U.S. workforce, provide more than 4 million jobs and generate almost four percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Successful operators demonstrate a commitment to excellence that makes them competitive players. Unlike larger companies, they’re not vertically integrated. They do not own refineries, and they do not pump gas. Yet they’re not relegated to the peripheries of the industry. They’re smack dab in the middle, finding and getting oil out of the ground with a precision and speed giving the big guys a run for the money.

“The big challenges for us are, first, keeping up with technology. Second, this is a terribly capital-intensive game. All of this horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing is wonderfully effective but horribly expensive,” says Sullivan.

With better technology, wells produce more, but the ante has been “upped.” Wells that cost $2 million in the late 1990s cost around $8 million today.

Over the last decade, the cost of technology has increased by a factor of four, give or take a million. But without that technology – specifically, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing – getting the oil out of the ground would be impossible.

Staying on the cutting edge is challenging for smaller companies without the research and development resources of their larger competitors.

“The industry is becoming more reliant on science and technology than it used to be. Keeping up is a daily challenge. We rely a lot on our geolo

geologists, and it’s a learning curve. Every day we learn something. You take the same ingredients today and make a different cake than you made 15 or 20 years ago,” says Sullivan.

It’s quite a cake, too. Business has been so good for independent producers over the last five years that OIPA is calling for an end to the federal government’s 30-year-old export ban. Thanks to shale fields, oil production has climbed to 1986 levels over the past five years.

Being smaller means being leaner. It’s easier to find efficiencies and, of course, there are fewer mouths to feed. Chaparral Energy has learned how to squeeze more oil out of the ground. When vertical wells start tapping out, bigger companies move on. Chaparral Energy moves in.

One of its two specialties is carbon dioxide enhanced recovery, reclaiming gas that would normally be released into the atmosphere and pumping it back into the well to increase pressure and output. When successful, it increases the well’s longevity by up to 15 percent. Chaparral is the third largest provider of enhanced recovery in the nation. It owns the largest recovery unit in the state, which is employed in Osage County.

Independents can capitalize on their size to take advantage of oil finds and fields that aren’t big enough to capture the attention of larger, integrated producers.

“If you discover a field that has the potential for a lot of wells, that really moves the needles for an independent. It makes a big difference. But the bigger the company, the bigger it needs to be to make an impact,” says Hatfield.

Chaparral also goes for the “pure play” and specializes in local oil and gas holdings. The company recently divested itself of fields in Texas and New Mexico in order to concentrate on the mid-continent oil field. The two-year-old strategy has worked. With roughly 700 employees, Chaparral recently produced one million barrels in one month.

“We’re not in North Dakota. We’re not in South Texas. We’re not offshore. We’re pure play in the mid-continent,” says Earl Reynolds, vice president of business development at Chaparral. “We believe that will benefit our shareholders because we’ll realize economies of scale. We’ll become much more efficient, and we’ll be more effective at being the best. Mother Nature gave us a great set of rocks to explore here, and we’re focusing all of our resources, capital and people on them.”

The shale boom has legs, and as long as smaller producers keep their eyes on the prize, they’ll be poised to grow. But they’ll choose not to. For them, small is the most important ingredient of success.

This story is part of an Oklahoma Energy Special Report. Continue reading additional stories from the report below.

• Oklahoma’s Energy
• Managing The Moving Parts
• The Alternatives
• Energy On The Brain