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.
Go Texas!
Then again, I do have a bias towards Texas, full disclosure....
What’s the best way to track inventories including tankers being used for storage.
How can this be? Haven’t the greenie idiots (aka: oil deniers) said that we were depleting oil soon? This must be all lies!!!
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 “capped” price wise for a long time.
Remember that while the US is using a lot of this technology, it has not spread to a number of the other major oil producing nations .... yet.
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_stoc_wstk_dcu_nus_w.htm
https://www.iea.org/oilmarketreport/omrpublic/charts/
That is false. Haliburton, Baker Hughes, Schlumberger and Weatherford perform the majority of the US hydraulic fracturing activities and are all international companies.
yikes. i hadn’t thought about that....
They, along with the doofus al gore - are all ****** up.
Things are starting to look more bleak. I’ve been lucky and have kept my job but I’m afraid of what’s going to happen if oil stays in the 30’s for a couple more months.
One of the positives is how efficient we are getting. We are setting records with the number of stages we are getting fraced. We have probably seen a 50% increase per frac crew. Some of that is just that now companies have more equipment on hand so there is less down time, but a lot of it is better time management.
This will all help us produce at a lower cost if prices would just come up some.
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?
ping to read later
So “Peak-oil” hasn’t happened yet.
I remember the doom and gloom mocumentary on the Nat Geo channel a few years ago saying we would all be living like Mad Max by 2015 or so.
Kinda like Al Gores global warming prediction.
Pffft spit
We shouldn't have changed the law against exporting oil and we shouldn't ship a single quart or cubic foot out of the country unless and until the coal industry is back in full swing supplying coal to generate electricity. Even then, we should only ship what we produce beyond our own annual requirements.
It is wrong to use the federal government to pick winners and losers in private industry.
It makes a lot of sense to export surplus expensive light sweet crude oil while we import cheaper heavy sour crude oil many refineries were already designed to run.
All crude oils are not equal.
Dropping the oil export ban has saved American jobs, and you get cheaper gas prices too. The ban a horrible law!
But if you lose money on it ... it won’t fly.
Damn those DINOs must have occupied every square inch of the earth! It almost makes you believe that oil may actually be a bi-product of the earth that there is so much of it!
"Peak-hype" hasn't happened yet, either.
Expect a greenie surge, and a big blowup about the next earthquake.
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