Posted on 01/27/2016 5:40:37 AM PST by thackney
Texas has lost at least 60,000 upstream oil and gas jobs, plus as many as 250,000 supply chain and retail jobs indirectly, as a result of the oil crash, according to an analyst with one of the top industry trade groups in the state.
Karr Ingham, a petroleum economist who compiles the semi-annual Texas Petro Index for the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, also doesn't expect those losses to stall in 2016.
The TPI's estimate of 250,000 job losses in Texas is devised from a multiplier tying upstream oil and gas job cuts to jobs elsewhere in the economy. Ingham said he believes four or five indirect jobs are lost for every upstream job in the state. Other economists put that estimate at six to seven indirect jobs, raising by hundreds of thousands the state's potential job losses.
But Ingham noted that growth in petrochemical and construction jobs along the Gulf Coast may have helped offset cuts in upstream.
Despite massive cutbacks in the oil field, Texas likely broke the state's 43-year-old record for crude oil production with an estimated 1.267 billion barrels in 2015, Ingham said Tuesday at the Petroleum Club in downtown Houston.
"If we don't hit [that record], we're going to get awfully close to it," he said.
Ingham said he is a "little worried" that Texas producers have unlocked so much oil supply that prices could stay depressed for years, as has happened with natural gas prices.
"The industry has cracked open an energy supply of crude oil and natural gas literally for decades into the future," he said.
The state's crude oil production peaked in March, reaching 3.6 million barrels per day according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But production has remained stubbornly high -- despite a massive drawdown that has seen hundreds of rigs sidelined in Texas oil fields -- because many wells were already drilled and completed.
"We're now on the course of sustained production decline in Texas," Ingham said. "But it's not like it just falls off a cliff."
Texas dropped from more than 306,000 direct upstream oil and gas jobs down to little more than 246,000 jobs by the end of the year, with more job reductions announced in January.
The last time oil prices hovered near $30 a barrel was in 2003, when Texas had only about 130,000 oil and gas jobs total; Ingham didn't project job losses to extend that far, but he said a lot more should be expected unless oil prices rebound.
"If prices were to not recover quickly and not rise much higher than they are now for some period of time, then the outlook in terms of overall activity levels and employment, in particular, is fairly dire," Ingham said. "That's not an industry that needs as many jobs on the payroll as it has right now."
Some projections have oil prices climbing in the second half of 2016, but many predictions for the latter half of 2015 promised a similar rise.
"They missed it by a country freakin' mile," Ingham said.
Yeah, so energy independence is only for the Saudis. Gotcha.
We will produce more oil with the elimination of the export ban, not less. Gulf Coast Light Sweet was bottlenecked.
I’m all for independence on foreign oil but there are a ton of factors involved. Are you going to put up the Billions of dollars to convert our oil refineries to process only domestic crude? Would the American people stomach the much higher gas prices that would be the result.
It’s easy to say the oil export ban was good and that we shouldn’t import foreign oil, but to actually do it is a whole other ball game. Maybe the free market will work this all out over many, many years and the refineries will put in the money to convert on their own.
I'm broken hearted over oil field people out of work, really. But I'm just as broken hearted over the people in other industries who are flipping burgers or not working at all rather than doing the job they trained for and worked at for years.
Why is saving oil industry jobs more important than everyone being in the same boat so maybe they can't be played off against one another with that BS about saving 1 job in one place while shipping 10 jobs elsewhere to some other country ?
Yeah, I hear ya', and I remember when someone chimed in years ago about how buying foreign steel saved jobs, and how buying foreign cars saved jobs, and how Walmart buying from China saved and created jobs, . . .
With all those jobs we saved with the same sort of profits first, US citizens last, why isn't the country in the middle of a huge, incredible, economic boom ?
“Drove out to Lubbock this weekend and saw 3 work over rigs. At these prices, what are they doing? Are they pulling the pipe to prep for shut in?”
Likely they are doing typical servicing costs required to keep things going, like changing our pump or repairing a tubing leak.
If a well is producing enough oil, then it is economically justified.
Some believe the conspiracy theory that oil companies collude to shut in oil to ‘prop up’ the price.
Nonsense
Yep. It was a huge bottleneck. It hard to teach about how oil is processed and the various grades. Let’s import their cheap stuff and export our expensive stuff. Money would be flowing into the US instead of the other way around.
Some believe the conspiracy theory that oil companies collude to shut in oil to âprop upâ the price.
How much does a barrel of oil have to cost to keep our rigs running? Coal would allow us to export more. Nuclear? Build a few. We would be a DEPENDABLE supplier. Squeeze the weapons money going to the middle East.
“I am of the opinion that the new drilling technologies such as fracking and horizontal drilling have opened up so much additional oil that the global market will be âcappedâ price wise for a long time.”
Depends upon what you think is a ‘long time’. It could be a couple of decades.
As a reservoir engineer who has worked unconventionals extensively, the problem I see is that there are only selective places that this will work. Oil is just so tough to flow through such tight rock, the rock must be fraccable, the rock must be in the proper maturity setting, etc. Places like the Bakken and Eagleford or pretty unique settings.
Now gas is a completely different matter. Gas flows much easier. What the industry has unlocked is a ‘burp’ for oil but could be considered virtually infinite as it will last many generations for gas.
I know many have mentioned it but this sure exposes the absolute “you can’t drill your way to lower prices” LIE.
All they do is lie. Why can’t they just be honest?
“How much does a barrel of oil have to cost to keep our rigs running? “
Depends if you are talking about drilling rigs or workover rigs.
Generally, drilling rigs require higher oil prices than do workover rigs.
Think of it this way: workover rigs are used to maintain oil wells already drilled and producing, while drilling rigs are used to find and tap new oil.
“I know many have mentioned it but this sure exposes the absolute âyou canât drill your way to lower pricesâ LIE.
All they do is lie. Why canât they just be honest?
“
Who are the “they”?
Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell just authored the Omnibus bill that funds wind and solar for the next several years.
Same with steel, machine tools, plastics, microchips, electronics, etc. Lots of factors every time
I have a half dozen friends in their late forties and early fifties who are barely hanging onto their home or have lost it but all of whom at one time lectured me about Free Trade. Now, not so much, they lost their jobs to H1-B Visa holders and every where they go the fact that they're over forty is all that really matters no matter how they slide around it. Not enough qualified people so let the market work ? Horse hockey, there aren't enough qualified people who will work wages a Bulgarian thinks are great.
Where's the free market in that? Their employer doesn't have to come to them and try to negotiate their salary down, show them how market factors changed, ask them to work for what two guys from Bulgaria would cost, they just let them go and fill out the forms swearing to God they can't get qualified people.
Wow, free market, the employer doesn't owe the employee a thing and it's alllll good because in theory it'll be fine in the long run. Please, free market my aunt Fannie, the employee isn't even in the market they're a commodity that illegals or imports replace just like foreign steel and foreign electronics replace US made steel and electronics because cheap labor is better and easier to screw over and cheaper than automation or training your people the way companies used to do.
How much free trade and free market do those folks who were fined and put out of business for not kowtowing to queers have ?
It's time to either fix what's wrong with the system that keeps Free Trade and "let the market work" from being a reality right here in the US for everyone, not just for those who can buy themselves a Congress Critter, or to stop telling the lie that those things will do any more than deliver more of the same misery with a few million illegal immigrants on top as icing.
If the fat cats couldn't move their cash cow overseas to avoid the very same things they fund, advocate, and bribe to get right here in the US they'd fund, advocate, and bribe, to get rid of what keeps the system here from working for everyone here. There is no "Free Trade" or "Free Market", there's a rigged game the big guys have bought and paid for and defending that crony capitalist system as if it's a real free market system is just absurd.
It is not a question of international COMPANIES. It is a question of LOCATION. Let me ask a rhetorical question as an example of what I mean.
How many of the previously producing oil fields such as Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, etc are using this technology now?
I suspect that there is a fairly large percentage that are not using the newer technologies.
Thanks!
It certainly isn’t as commonly used, but I suspect it is used in all the countries you mentioned.
Remember, hydraulic fracturing isn’t new. It has been used since the 1940s.
Steerable directional drilling is the newer technology, which combined with hydro fracs, made the shale economical to produce.
Hydro frac tech has advanced significantly and is used more in the US than anywhere else, but it is used world wide and has been for a long time.
For example:
Successful Hydraulic Fracturing through Optimization Steps for High Rate Deep Gas Wells in Carbonate Reservoirs, Saudi Arabia
https://www.onepetro.org/conference-paper/SPE-81585-MS
Publication Date 2003
You sound like Carly Fiorina, the powerful, the well connected...
So based on that, I am speculating that oil and gas production will remain high over the next few years. Further, a rise in oil price will work to increase the number of sites that can either return to production or open new wells. I further assume that there will be additional improvements in the technology so that it will either be more efficient or lower cost.
The net effect that I see is making it much harder for multi year significant increases in oil price. I see $20 per barrel as the low end and $40 for the upper end for quite some time - decade perhaps.
There will always be people who want to buy politicians, politicians haven't always been almost to a man willing to sell.
Predicting the price of oil out a decade is a fools game.
Way too much affects the price of oil outside the oil industry.
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