Life on the Black Top

Only a small group of vehicles are visible at a stop roughly 15 miles or so on Bishop Rd. as workers are seen flattening hot, steaming asphalt and forming it onto a new surface. Just ahead of them, a second crew is filling humps on the surface of the road while a steamroller flattens asphalt in order to make it a smoother ride for vehicles. These men are employed by McGarvin-Moberly Construction and have worked tirelessly for the last two months in order to overlay a road section 21 miles long. Amazingly, road construction projects sometimes seem like the only thing that is happening in the Wyoming prairie. And with oil companies realizing larger profits when producing less asphalt and more gasoline and diesel, there are concerns that higher road maintenance costs could lead to roads falling into disrepair. This doesn’t sound too good for Class A truck driving jobs or CDL truck driving jobs.

Thanks to high oil prices, road constructions immediate future looks bleak. Rising oil prices directly affect the price of diesel that is used to run construction equipment as well as petroleum lubricant that is used to keep the machines properly lubricated. And only around 3% or so of a barrel of crude oil ends up yielding the crucial element that is needed to create asphalt. As we all know, asphalt plays a critical role in our nation’s road system. Fully 90% of our roads are made of asphalt. Also, coker machines can convert asphalts binding component into diesel, making it much more economically feasible for refineries to produce diesel instead of asphalt.

In Wyoming there are five oil refineries, two of which the Sinclair Oil Company owns. Their largest refinery refines roughly 71,500 barrels daily. There second largest one refines roughly 52,000 barrels daily. According to Craig Menees, the GM of Sinclair refineries, the larger refinery no longer produces asphalt and the smaller refinery waits for parts to arrive so they can produce asphalt. Sinclair Oils Frontier refinery already possessed a fully operational coker machine to produce diesel fuel with while their Sinclair refinery recently added one. And their Cenex refinery located in Montana also just added a new coker. According to Menees, since three cokers are now operational, asphalt is being replaced and overtaken in the market with diesel fuel.

As fall begins to approach, so to does the end of road construction work for the year. Tom Murphy Jr., Vice President of Intermountain Construction and Materials, feels it is highly likely that as new construction contracts are negotiated this spring, they will be on a weekly and not a yearly basis due to price fluctuations in materials. For example, if asphalt follows roughly the same price increase pattern like that of oil, asphalt costs may double to between $700-$800 per ton.

With such high asphalt prices, some municipalities are seeking black top alternatives. Mr. Sheridan began to receive bids from contractors for projects, asking for quotes using both concrete and asphalt as a building material. When accepting winning bids, he chose the less expensive material to build with which was usually concrete. And with a shift to concrete from asphalt, concrete costs may increase by 30% or 40% as demand continues to grow. He also understands that, “While we’re a community trying to build roads, houses and schools, it will suddenly become very expensive and more so next year.”

On Bishop Road once again, McGarvin-Moberly supervisor Greg Wentz has seen all too well what a short asphalt supply is capable of. And he is very unnerved about what the future may hold. That is because at a Rock Springs job earlier in the year, their material supplier actually limited their daily asphalt cement supply. In fact, instead of receiving three deliveries per day, they only received one. Thus, the companies’ production level slowed by roughly two thirds. Again, road construction and repairs slowing down does not look good for Class A truck driving jobs or CDL truck driving jobs either.

The fuel tax is the main way Wyoming funds WyDOT. However, an increase of ten cents was defeated in the Legislatures last session, even though that increase would still fall short when compared to the inflation in construction costs. And since our Federal Highway Trust Fund has almost gone belly up, new legislation only provides funding for high traffic corridors. The road construction and repair industry future looks bleak, indeed.