#oilandgas

Heard Suncor to take some stake in the Kearl lake asset IOL?

Any news or updates on that?

Heard CNRL is going to acquire some stake in IOL KEARL LAKE.

any updates or news about this?

I read there is high interest in BP's NS assets. I imagine that everyone wants to expedite the sale, especially the affected employees. It will be very beneficial to work for a company that values the assets and employees and considers them a core asset rather than small legacy asset. Alaska has thrived after BP's sale.

Ask about this in your face to face sessions

Nazar Mohamed and his son, Azruddin, are partners in a lucrative venture to build Exxon a shore base in Guyana for its massive offshore oil operation. They also face a criminal investigation and possible U.S. sanctions.

U.S. government officials repeatedly warned Exxon Mobil to avoid doing business with two mining magnates in Guyana, who face a U.S. investigation on suspicions of money laundering, dr-g trafficking and gold smuggling, according to five people with knowledge of the matter and two intelligence reports seen by Reuters.

The Texas-based oil giant ignored the advice, which was delivered during meetings in late 2021 and early 2022, and cut a deal to build a $300 million onshore logistics base with a consortium that included the two Guyanese businessmen, Nazar Mohamed and his son, Azruddin. Exxon announced the contract award in April 2022.

• https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/exxon-mobil-guyana/

Wow, as a long term investor in imperial, you got to be worried. Anyone know what the attrition rate and if anyone is actually left to manage these assets when everyone keeps resigning.

Hi all,

I am looking for reservoir engineer job and saw many job posts by Exxon at the same time i am seeing too many people leaving the company. I am not sure what is going on. Is the unconventional teams are doing good and keep hiring or like all departments in the company. Thank you.

How am I in the minority? It's not the same as it was a decade ago, but this is still a god job, especially considering everything that's been happening in the industry.

Executives publicly say Guyana is a once in a life opportunity and then beat up teams internally and compare everything against Guyana. It makes zero sense.

https://www.ogj.com/general-interest/companies/news/55404137/barclays-conference-chevron-sees-venezuela-as-a-factory-development-exxon-says-operators-matter-more-than-ever

I was talking to a reservoir engineer about my job search and interviews as we both want to leave. It is proving much more challenging for him than me as reservoir engineering is pretty much just oil and gas. I encouraged him to look at geothermal energy. My skill set is more transferable to other industries.

I was in a meeting this week and 40% of those in the room were principal engineers or senior principal engineers. Collectively they knew zero about what was being discussed. There was me and one other person who actually understood the technical details. After the meeting he shared that he too had been rocketed to the bottom of the assessments.

Good luck to all once you get rid of those of us who actually understand oil and gas.

The news is ripe with stories of attacks on GCC Facilities and Refineries in the region. The KSA is being affected. The KSA will persevere through these tough times and will probably be stronger when the conflict ends.

What’s the scoop? Moving things to India, what else is new? 007

All the major tailings projects and others are well are being pushed to be completed by mid 2027. Also, it's a lot of cost to move the control room to Edmonton due to fiber cost and they haven't even started it yet. This is very clear that the want to sell the asset.

Just wondering what's the plan once they sell the asset will the employees who moved to Edmonton be laid off? as the new company possibly CNRL or Suncor employees will handle the upstream asset.

Please provide insights if you have

Alright, so want to really understand what salary curve differences exist between these groups.

How high Geos are vs. Engineers in the Upstream? Looking for CL examples.

What about Upstreamers vs. Downstreamers? How high is Upstream? Again give CL level examples.

Trolls, just listen or add your valuable commentary to the other posts.

Do we still need exploration? How much value has exploration created last 5yrs?

Are we ready to go back into Venezuela? Would we need to increase hiring and reduce layoffs/PIPs to ramp up activity there? Or we’ll simply lean on more BTC?

Guesses on how quick? Fire sale? It doesn’t fit either business Needs to be with a Gas explorer.

Is there future in Canadian Heavy Oil and Imperial?

Is Venezuela more appealing?

It'd be nice if they offered that option before involuntary cuts.

What happens to Oxy if Trump bombs Oman? We have a big position there don’t we?

https://apnews.com/article/oman-iran-war-us-hormuz-a8298715a51159225d2f37a6d50ce682

Halliburton has been cutting across at least three divisions this year, with some units down 20 to 40 percent.

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Oil-and-Gas-Employment-Hits-a-2026-Low-Even-as-Production-Sets-Records.html

Oil and Gas Employment Hits a 2026 Low Even as Production Sets Records
By Michael Kern - Jul 18, 2026, 10:00 AM CDT

U.S. oil and gas extraction employment fell to 114,500 workers in June, the second-lowest June on record, even though domestic output is near an all-time high.
Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips and Imperial Oil have all announced big layoffs this year, and it's mergers and automation driving it, not falling oil prices.
The jobs disappearing fastest (roustabout and wellhead labor) pay a fraction of what the jobs going unfilled (electricians, automation techs) pay, and geothermal projects and AI data centers are already soaking up some of the overflow.
Chevron is cutting up to 9,000 jobs this year. That's a fifth of its global workforce, gone, while it digests the $53 billion Hess deal. ExxonMobil trimmed 2,000. BP shed more than 5 percent of its staff, plus 3,000 contractors. ConocoPhillips is cutting 20 to 25 percent. Imperial Oil is cutting a fifth of its people and shutting its Calgary office entirely. And in June, U.S. oil and gas extraction employment fell to 114,500 workers, the second-lowest June the Bureau of Labor Statistics has on record, beaten only by the pandemic bottom of 2021.
Production didn't fall; it's near record highs…but the jobs are disappearing anyway. 
And before anyone assumes it’s renewable energy’s fault…it isn’t, not directly, at least. Nobody at Chevron got a pink slip because a wind farm opened next door. Automation, mergers, and a decade of investors who'd rather see returns than growth did this.

Ten Years, 72,800 Fewer Jobs
Back in January 2016, extraction employment topped out at 187,300, right before the price crash gutted the sector… 
A decade on, the workforce sits almost 40 percent below that number, even while wells across the Permian and Eagle Ford keep breaking output records. This year alone tells the story in miniature… 115,500 in January, a bump to 116,200 in February, then a slide every month after, down to 114,500 by June.
The May-to-June dip isn't even new. Extraction jobs have fallen in that exact window in 7 of the last 11 years. Call it seasonal if you want. The floor keeps dropping every year regardless.
One footnote worth knowing: these figures get revised constantly. May's number came in at 115,600 first, then got walked back to 115,300 a month later. Treat any single month less like gospel and more like a rough read on direction.
Extraction, though, is the smaller of the two numbers that matter here. 
Oilfield services, the drilling contractors, completions crews, pressure pumpers, employs something like 627,000 people, more than five times the extraction headcount, and it's been losing jobs even faster. 
The ripple effects run deep, too…every upstream job is estimated to support roughly 232,000 supply chain jobs and 421,000 more through spending, more than 850,000 positions riding on an industry that keeps figuring out how to need fewer people directly.
The productivity data backs this up. Output per hour jumped 11.4 percent in 2023 while labor input barely budged, and total factor productivity swung from a 14.7 percent drop in 2021 to a 30.2 percent gain two years later. Nobody's working harder out there. They're working with better tools, and fewer of them.

Who's Actually Getting the Call
This year's layoff wave has less to do with oil prices than with a decade of mergers finally catching up. 
Chevron's cuts, the largest in company history, are chasing $2 billion to $3 billion in savings from folding Hess into the existing operation. 
“We do not take these actions lightly,” a spokesperson said, which is the sort of thing companies always say. BP is chasing a similar $2 billion target. ExxonMobil's cuts followed its own Pioneer deal. Merge two companies, and merging their field offices comes next, whether or not a single well changes how it produces. The services companies have a more familiar excuse…business has slowed. Halliburton has been cutting across at least three divisions this year, with some units down 20 to 40 percent. SLB has been through its own rounds of cuts and reshuffling. Both companies live and die by the rig count, and the rig count hasn't been kind.
There's a bit of irony buried in here, too. Chevron moved its headquarters from California to Houston back in 2024, calling it a bet on Texas. Some of this year's cuts landed on that same Houston campus.

West Texas Learns to Sell Electricity
Texas is the one place that complicates the whole story... 
Upstream jobs there grew for three straight months into May, then reversed hard in June, down 1,500 to 2,000 positions, one of five negative months this year. And yet Texas posted 10,409 job listings in May, up 6 percent from April, more than any other state. Houston alone had nearly 2,700 listings. 
Most of that hiring, by the way, sits in support activities and services, not extraction itself, the same layer of the industry absorbing the deepest cuts everywhere else. 
What's really rewriting the Permian right now isn't drilling. It's electricity. 
Microsoft is talking with Chevron and Engine No. 1 about a $7 billion gas plant near Pecos, built specifically to feed an AI data center, wired straight into Chevron's own gas wells instead of the overloaded Texas grid. A couple hundred miles east, OpenAI's Stargate campus in Abilene runs the same play… its own gas plant, no grid required. One of these data centers can use 5 to 6 million gallons of water a day, which works out to roughly 143,000 barrels in oilfield terms. 
Basin boosters have started talking about exporting electricity instead of barrels. And that shift is already changing who gets hired locally: electricians, welders, power technicians, not another frack crew.

Pay Doesn't Match Who's Needed
Geoscientists earn a median $99.50 an hour, more than $206,000 a year. 
Petroleum engineers aren't far off at $86.58. 
Roustabouts, the entry-level hands doing the physical work on a wellsite, earn $23.30 an hour, under $49,000 a year. Wellhead pumpers make $36.62.
Guess which end of that range is disappearing fastest… It's the bottom. 
And yet half of mining and extraction employers say they can't find enough electricians and skilled trades, even while total headcount shrinks. 
That's not really about too few workers. It's about the wrong skills sitting in the wrong hands: a modern, automated wellsite runs on sensor systems, remote monitoring and predictive maintenance, not the training a lot of the existing workforce spent years building. 
Veterans make up about 9 percent of the broader energy workforce, more than their share of the economy overall, and roughly three in ten energy workers are under 30. Both groups are exactly who geothermal startups and data center builders are trying to recruit right now.

Where the Skills Actually Go
None of this means oil and gas workers have nowhere to go. It means where they can go doesn't always match where they happen to be standing. Geothermal is the clearest match. A 2024 Energy Department estimate put the number of people who already have the drilling and subsurface skills geothermal needs at roughly 300,000. 
The actual geothermal workforce today? Just 8,870. That gap is basically all headroom. 
Drillers who've made the jump describe it as barely different work, still making a hole in the ground, still sealing it up, just chasing heat instead of hydrocarbons. 
One driller who spent a decade in New England wells now runs drilling for a geothermal company and says the safety training and the technical chops carried over almost untouched. The Energy Department has put $171.5 million behind next-generation geothermal testing, and a federal advisory panel wants dedicated training centers built to move oil and gas crews over directly, plus a plan to keep veteran workers around as mentors so decades of unwritten wellsite knowledge doesn't walk out the door with them. Zoom out further and clean energy overall looks lopsided in a way that's easy to misread. Solar, wind, EVs, efficiency and grid work together employ 3.56 million people now, more than three times the roughly 1.9 million across oil, gas and coal, and growing about three times faster than the rest of the economy. Sounds like the obvious landing spot. Except the jobs aren't where the layoffs are. Researchers have documented a real geographic mismatch: the places losing oil and gas jobs and the places adding clean energy ones are rarely the same places, and workers don't relocate for a new job even when their skills transfer cleanly. 

Texas is the case in point. 
Its clean energy sector employs more than 283,000 people, but that's still only 29 percent of the state's total energy workforce. Even that growth has slowed, with policy rollbacks from this year's federal budget law putting an estimated 830,000 jobs at risk nationwide.
For most workers this isn't a straight line from a rig to a wind farm. It's whatever's actually nearby…a data center outside Abilene, a geothermal rig in New England, a services company retooling around software instead of headcount.
That doesn't make the industry disposable, either. A leaner oilfield is a more profitable one per worker, and people who survive a merger often land in better-paying, more specialized jobs than the ones they started in. It's a narrow set of job categories disappearing. Not the whole industry.

Same Industry. Fewer, Different Jobs.
The industry isn't dying…It's producing near-record volumes and probably will for a while. What's changed, though, is how few people it takes to hit those numbers, and which people those are. Fewer roughnecks, more automation technicians. Fewer roustabouts, more remote operations specialists. That pay gap is only going to get wider as the mix keeps shifting.
Whether anyone plans for it or not, the workforce is already sorting itself out.

By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com

What happens to pearl with the strait of Hormuz going to be permanently tolled/blocked.

Despite over 2,600 layoffs in Houston during the first half of 2026, the regional economy is showing resilience. High oil prices are significantly boosting the energy sector, a key driver of local employment. Economists note that Houston's economic acceleration is notable against a cooling national trend. The World Cup also contributed to job gains in sectors like leisure and hospitality. Overall, the job market is performing better than initially anticipated.

Houston, Texas

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/houston-layoffs-jobs-2026-22369185.php

All you other basins are not long for this company. It’s all about the Benjamins now babay

What’s the status of the re-org?

This will be the biggest reduction and change to staff at this site.

Will be interesting to see it play out.

Plenty fat. Top Heavy job roles

With every region in NAL losing money and LTF being down layoffs are coming this month. The writing is on the wall at this point, but which PSL’s or areas are going to be hit worse?

Is it just me or is there an active campaign to push out all of the upstream employees?

will the midcon asset survive, and if so what is the point of holding such an asset in the portfolio? - A holding corral for employees to be trained in and moved to more significant assets?

yes some people are being moved to the okc tower, but where will Devon be in 5 years? Constant re-orgs and layoffs have left Oklahoma hollowed out as a destination for oil and gas workers

First Marcellus, now, EF and Powder. That’s 12 billion in divestitures. Take that to the bank.

Still won’t help the share price.

Just an FYI:

• Aramco
• BP
• Crescent
• Diamondback
• Energy Transfer
• EOG Resources
• Fervo Energy
• Venture Global LNG

Do we still need Exploration? Is EM still winning post Guyana?

Lessons learned from Hormuz conflict is that XOM needs secure LNG and Venture Global is the perfect fit. XOM was slow in January of 2026 where it could have bought it cheap…and most likely paid it off in short term

Lessons learned from Hormuz conflict is that XOM needs secure LNG and Venture Global is the perfect fit. XOM was slow in January of 2026 where it could have bought it cheap…and most likely paid it off in short term

Lessons learned from Hormuz conflict is that XOM needs secure LNG and Venture Global is the perfect fit. XOM was slow in January of 2026 where it could have bought it cheap…and most likely paid it off in short term

Shell can’t drill it’s self to prosperity so it’s levers are buy Shell stock, offload marginal production, and try to buy a company with existing production. Shell needs a big move within the next 6 months.

How’s a Woodside and Shell marriage? Certainly satisfy the Asia market while reduced investment in the ME.

How’s Kosmos? Cheap and get instant gas to Europe

Rex Tillerson recently visited LT with a very pessimistic outlook of market and economic prospects. He highlighted that factors leading to a black swan are highly probable. As we all know this will be a perfect opportunity for XOM to grow inorganically and further cement its position as a market leader.
What type of event do you predict?
Last time we were given the COVID crisis this time maybe consequential…nonsense or fortuitous?