He fell fourteen feet off a gas buster before he ever worked in safety. Today he runs EHS for a well servicing company that built a fully electric rig.

TJ Potts, CSP, is director of EHS at Axis Energy Services, a well servicing company with crews in North Dakota, Wyoming, Texas, Mississippi, Florida and several other states. He is based in San Antonio and travels often to check on those crews. 

He did not start in safety. After college at Weber State University he moved to Vernal, Utah, did roustabout work, and then joined Pioneer Energy Services on its drilling rigs. A couple of years in, he got a chance to move into safety. 

Fourteen feet off a gas buster

“I walk the talk. I really believe what it is that I’m trying to sell,” he says. As a rig hand, though, “I was always having tons of issues.” Then he came off a gas buster, the vessel that strips gas out of drilling mud. “I actually fell off a gas buster 14 feet and landed on my back.” 

In that moment, he says, he realized that what he had been sacrificing “in the name of trying to be a good hand, trying to be efficient and do things quickly” was his family and the things he enjoyed doing. He was risking “serious injury or death” for a job where, if something happened to him, “they would have somebody there to take my place” on the next shift. 

He started applying safety to every part of his life. “It wasn’t just a light switch I could turn on and off,” he says. “I had to commit to changing the way I looked at everything.” 

He leads with the business case

His years in operations taught him what the people across the table get measured on. “The point of every business is to make money and provide the service that we say we’re going to provide,” he says, so he builds the safety pitch on top of that: “I have to make sure that what I approach them with from a safety perspective leans into that, and I have to get that buy-in.” 

Getting operations on board is also how his early ideas spread. As a manager he brought in changes to lockout/tagout and took his area’s safety work digital. Once the digital system proved itself, the corporate team adopted it across the entire company. He credits much of his rise to not being willing to “accept the status quo and say, this is the way we’ve always done it.” 

Accountability pointed at himself

Two leaders shaped how he works. The first was Brian Tucker, who later became Pioneer’s chief operating officer and changed how Potts thought about accountability. “It wasn’t that I was always holding people accountable, but I was holding myself accountable,” Potts says. When something went wrong, his first question was what he could have done differently. The answer might be better tools or better communication. Or, in his words, “was I not auditing that rig enough?” 

The second was a director who would not take problems off his hands. “You’re the closest to it. What’s the solution?” Potts remembers him asking. “And what did your team on the field think is the solution?” 

Tucker, too, “always went to the field to get those solutions,” and Potts took the lesson with him. “People are going to be a lot more bought in to change if they’re a part of it and they get to have some say in it,” he says. When he goes to the field, he tells crews, “You guys are the experts. You’re the ones who know the better way to do this.” 

Drilling got three-year contracts that could justify a $35 million rig to investors, and the equipment to get crews out of the derrick and off the rig floor. Drillers also ran stand-downs and invested in training and people on location. In his telling, though, the big safety gains came only once the tools changed, when companies said, as he puts it, “we’re no longer going to throw chain, we’re no longer going to use tongs” and put iron roughnecks on the floor to make and break pipe connections in place of hands. “It wasn’t until they invested the capital into doing that,” he says. He points to where drilling is now: “they don’t have anyone on the floor during connections. The connections aren’t even done by a person. The rig is autonomous.” 

The investment gap is what drew him to Axis. He was enjoying his work at CPS Energy, the San Antonio utility where he spent three years and finished as interim director, but “Axis was trying to change the industry,” he says. The company had put electric drawworks on a well service platform, a rig it calls the EPIC Rig and describes as the first fully electric well service rig in the industry. “You’re changing the way that the work is done,” Potts says, and he wanted to work for “an organization that’s actually putting their money where their mouth is and trying to make a better product.” 

He tells his crews that well servicing is likely to follow drilling once the technology gets more cost-effective: “we need to be very good at what we do because this is where things are going.” 

Potts once fell fourteen feet off a gas buster. Today he checks on well service crews from North Dakota to Florida, and he wants their work to change for the same reason he gives for everything else: “Everybody that comes to work, they want to go home safe, and they want to be there for their families and be there to do the things that they love doing outside of their job.” 

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