A gloomy piece on oil and gas employment … hopefully it will get better in 5 years or so
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Before getting promoted to EVP, she had a milquetoast position in CTC. In GOM, about the only exploration she did was the menu in the cafeteria.
Once MW decided to give up on exploration ("too risky"), Liz became a very convenient diversity placement. A completely mediocre work history in GOM.
Ever find anything, no, but she get top scores for top level participation in the Women, Qu--r and other key social networks. Get your priorities straight!
You mean Liz never found anything?
@4grb, see the comment below about the stopped clock. To continue the woeful saga of Chevron Exploration, you should ask yourself, who were the people responsible for Anchor? (or any other significant Chevron discovery anywhere in the world?) Did they win any Chairman's Awards? Did they end up in Chevron Exploration management, to use their skill and experience to foster other discoveries? Did they end up as Senior Exploration Advisors? Did they end up working or supervising in other high-potential areas? Ask around, you will find out that for both Tahiti and Anchor, the people responsible all "disappeared" within a few years of those discoveries. So much for rewarding performance, so much for harvesting skills...
Who discovered anchor?
Frankly, with the Guyana purchase the path is now clear for Chevron to be a much smaller (and profitable) company in the future. No need for any MCP’s now, just use Permian to pay for Guyana for the next few years. All this acquisition of acerage is just FOMO.
They will use lower pay to slowly re-size the company.
@3hju, you're right, but Chevron's tradition is making "discoveries" from bought-companies' portfolios. Thailand (RIP) was Unocal's work, Tahiti was Texaco's work, Perdido was (NOJV) Shell's work, Marcellus (RIP) was Atlas' work, Nargis was Eni's work, and soon Guyana will be from Exxon's work. Even the vaunted Permian was built on legacy (i.e., decades ago) no-royalty acreage that was considered worthless prior to fracking and horizontal drilling.
Even a stopped clock is right two times a day. They will eventually hit something.
@2std. Don’t worry about development OC, Chevron exploration has not found anything new in 20 years.
I hear of Chevron bidding for new exploration blocks in Namibia, Brazil. New development in eastern med and west Africa.
Where is the OC? Deepwater expertise has been decimated and is not easy to hire back.
@2rem, bo-m hiring in the 2000s is what necessitated all the layoffs in the 2010s.
It all depends on how the transition to clean energy pans out. There is significant R&D on battery technology, also with the AI and new chips, the landscape on lot of technical work will shift drastically in the industrial countries, so the jobs will also shift from labor intensive to more maintenance and software engineering and data management. For the rest of the world, it will be a much slower transition if any as the labor cost still is significantly lower compared to cutting edge technology they have to buy off the shelf of industrial cou tries at a hefty price.
The downsizing of the past ten years will eventually result in a shortage of technical resources. The same thing happened after the 80s and 90s. That led to bo hiring in the 2000s.
I disagree about bad news if you just entered during the last 10 years. I think it is a good time to be in the industry. Most oil and gas skills are needed on the other side of the energy transition too. It is easy to let fear cloud things.
@1tcm hit it exactly. O&G is in a slow decline mode, some of it societal, some of it self-inflicted. None of it due to shrinking resource base. Look at the history of US Steel or NASA, maybe GM as well, to see analogies. From the article, "...With US oil production expected to plateau in about five years...", 1) This is Hubbard's "peak oil" everyone's been arguing over the last decade or so, and 2) don't expect any more bo-m cycles. That said, say goodbye to the gyrations of hiring and firing cycles - this is going to be gradual downsizing. Bad news if you just entered the industry in the last 10 years.
The industry will be smaller in terms of headcount but
Perfect timing for me! 5 years to go
Even amid record production, oil and gas industry employment is down 128,700 from its mid-2014 peak.
The US is the world’s top producer of oil and natural gas, and its production of both has been breaking records this year.
The US Is Breaking Records Again in Oil and Gas Production
This simple and indisputable reality has been getting remarkably little public attention in the US even as it helps bring down inflation worldwide, enables Western Europe to get by without Russian natural gas and otherwise reshapes the global economy and geopolitics. There are clear political reasons for this: President Biden and other Democrats would rather not talk about oil and gas production breaking records because a big part of their political base thinks the US should shut down domestic oil and gas production; Republican front-runner Donald Trump and the rest of his party would rather not talk about it because they want voters to believe that Biden has shut down domestic oil and gas production.
There’s also a more straightforward reason the oil and gas bo-m isn’t being celebrated: It doesn’t feel like a bo-m in the places where oil and gas is produced. Even amid those production records, industry employment is down 128,700 from its mid-2014 peak and down 41,200 from just before the pandemic in February 2020. And while employment has risen from its early 2021 low, the job gains seem to have stalled last summer.
A Lot Fewer Oil and Gas Jobs
Oil and gas workers are also getting paid less in real terms than before the pandemic. In fact, as employment in the industry continues to shift from oil and gas companies themselves to lower-paying service providers, average pay overall is lower than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation.
Real Pay Is Down Lately for Oil and Gas Workers
The oil and gas jobs crunch has regional impacts. Of the 10 states where nonfarm payroll employment still hasn’t recovered from its early-in-the-pandemic collapse, four (Louisiana, West Virginia, North Dakota and Alaska) have a significant oil and gas industry presence. Texas, home to 61% of US oil and gas jobs in November, is of course booming despite the industry’s cutbacks. But as a result, oil and gas exploration and production now directly account for just 1.5% of the state’s jobs, down from 2.6% in 2014.
Oil and gas make up a much larger share than that of Texas’s gross domestic product — around 9.5% in 2022, which is the most recent such data available. But that’s kind of the point here. The productivity of the US oil and gas industry has exploded.
More Energy Per Worker
This is another way of looking at the big shift in oil and gas industry priorities that my fellow Bloomberg Opinion columnists Javier Blas and Liam Denning have been describing for a while now. “Shale pioneers once put growth over profit, burning billions of dollars in the process,” Javier summed up last April, “today, they are focused on making money for their shareholders.” With US oil production expected to plateau in about five years and natural gas production to grow only slowly, this tightfistedness is likely to continue.
All this puts the US political divide over oil and gas in a certain amount of perspective. It’s definitely true that Democratic policies can be expected to lead to less domestic oil and gas production over time than Republican ones. But over the short to medium term, other factors predominate, and employment in the sector seems headed downward regardless.
https://energynow.com/2024/01/u-s-oil-and-gas-bo-m-doesnt-feel-like-one-to-workers/
Afraid this is just the start. We are now at peak oil, not because we can't find more but rather because we are investing less in long-term exploration and reserves growth. The long touted alternatives are gradually starting to grow, with new game changer batteries on the horizon and other technology just staring to make a difference. Sure oil and gas are here to stay for a lot longer, but the high times of ever increasing growth are ending. Declining industries are never as fun to work for as ones that are growing. For those who keep saying "Lord just give me one more bo-m as this time I will save some money" ... this it it!
OP: "...hopefully it will get better in 5 years or so"
Don't count on it... this isn't 2008.