The Biggest U.S. Oil Companies Are Eliminating Thousands of Jobs

The New York Times ^ | 9/3/2025 | Rebecca Elliott

[Miami Rebel]

In the last couple of years, the largest U.S. oil companies gobbled up smaller ones. Now, contending with persistently mediocre oil prices, those giants are laying off many workers in hopes of squeezing more fuel from the ground at lower cost.

The latest is ConocoPhillips of Houston, which said on Wednesday that it would cut up to 25 percent of its global staff, or as many as 3,250 people, most of them this year. The company employs around 13,000 people, including contractors.

“We are always looking at how we can be more efficient with the resources we have,” a company spokesman said in a statement.

ConocoPhillips’s announcement comes almost a year after it closed a $17 billion acquisition of Marathon Oil, which was part of a deal-making spree in the U.S. oil patch. Companies often lay off workers after making big purchases.

While the fossil fuels sector has secured many policy wins this year under the Trump administration, from promises of speedier permitting to more frequent lease sales and relaxed emissions regulations, many of those changes will take years to lift their profits.

What affects them today is the price of oil and natural gas. And while gas prices have recovered from record lows in 2024, oil prices have been just OK. Crude now fetches roughly $64 a barrel in the United States and has traded in that ballpark for most of the year. That is enough for most companies to make money drilling new wells, but a lot lower than companies grew accustomed to in the last few years.

Chevron announced plans this year to lay off up to 20 percent of its work force at the time, which would amount to around 9,000 people.

[Owen]

Oh I see what happened. I quoted % losses.

That’s not dollars. That’s % loss of barrels/day coming out of the ground year to year. Not money loss. Output loss.

[Political Junkie Too]

As the US engagement in the Iraq War was winding down in 2007, McClatchy Newspapers ran this story:

As violence falls in Iraq, cemetery workers feel the pinch

Excerpt:

A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that's cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.

-PJ

[Robert DeLong]

They could be throttling back on purpose, hoping to get a rise in the price of oil.

[Owen]

If you mean the Permian, it can’t work that way.

Shale wells drill horizontal and die vertically. Meaning on the production graph. Unlike conventional wells, fracked shale wells are producing too little to justify expenses within about 4 years. Contrasted with Saudi Arabian wells in decline, but still producing after 60 years.

If output of those legacy shale wells dies sharply, and there is no new drilling / wells to counter that decline, then the company as a whole dies. So in the world of shale, if there is decline, it is always involuntary — something prevents the new drilling.