March 14, 2015 – EnergyWire
Oil slump scrambles plans for tackling 'great crew change'
By: Nathanial Gronewold
HOUSTON -- The oil price bust has become a major speed bump in the industry's "great crew change."
The oldest, most skilled workers are nearing retirement age, and some are hitting the exits early as oil's doldrums are triggering layoffs and a hiring slowdown…
Read the full story here: http://www.eenews.net/energywire/stories/1060033920
…Estimates for layoffs globally reach into the hundreds of thousands, with much of the pain felt in the United States, where the industry expanded at the fastest pace during the shale oil and gas boom. The first to go were the roughnecks and roustabouts as rigs were pulled from service.
Workers for oil field service companies have been hit hard since oil prices turned downward. Eventually, the bust hit regional well operators before making their way to the higher-ups at corporate headquarters in Houston and elsewhere.
Rusty Braziel, an industry analyst at RBN Energy and author of a new book on the shale oil boom, said the pattern is similar to the start of an industry downturn in the mid-1980s. The major difference is that most didn't expect the price to rebound at the time, and there was no wave of retirements hitting oil and gas companies in the late 1980s.
"There was no light at the end of the tunnel," Braziel said. "In 1986, the industry cut a lot of people, they cut a lot of people quickly, and most of those folks over some period of time, it was a year or two, simply gave up on the industry altogether, left the industry entirely and never came back."
Young people didn't replace them either, he said. The industry simply shrank and stayed smaller until the turn of the millennium, when the crude price began creeping up again. "There was a decade and a half when very few young people came into the industry," Braziel recalled.
