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Alright, so want to really understand what salary curve differences exist between these groups.
How high Geos are vs. Engineers in the Upstream? Looking for CL examples.
What about Upstreamers vs. Downstreamers? How high is Upstream? Again give CL level examples.
Trolls, just listen or add your valuable commentary to the other posts.
Do we still need exploration? How much value has exploration created last 5yrs?
Are we ready to go back into Venezuela? Would we need to increase hiring and reduce layoffs/PIPs to ramp up activity there? Or we’ll simply lean on more BTC?
Guesses on how quick? Fire sale? It doesn’t fit either business Needs to be with a Gas explorer.
Is there future in Canadian Heavy Oil and Imperial?
Is Venezuela more appealing?
It'd be nice if they offered that option before involuntary cuts.
What happens to Oxy if Trump bombs Oman? We have a big position there don’t we?
https://apnews.com/article/oman-iran-war-us-hormuz-a8298715a51159225d2f37a6d50ce682
Halliburton has been cutting across at least three divisions this year, with some units down 20 to 40 percent.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Oil-and-Gas-Employment-Hits-a-2026-Low-Even-as-Production-Sets-Records.html
Oil and Gas Employment Hits a 2026 Low Even as Production Sets Records
By Michael Kern - Jul 18, 2026, 10:00 AM CDT
U.S. oil and gas extraction employment fell to 114,500 workers in June, the second-lowest June on record, even though domestic output is near an all-time high.
Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips and Imperial Oil have all announced big layoffs this year, and it's mergers and automation driving it, not falling oil prices.
The jobs disappearing fastest (roustabout and wellhead labor) pay a fraction of what the jobs going unfilled (electricians, automation techs) pay, and geothermal projects and AI data centers are already soaking up some of the overflow.
Chevron is cutting up to 9,000 jobs this year. That's a fifth of its global workforce, gone, while it digests the $53 billion Hess deal. ExxonMobil trimmed 2,000. BP shed more than 5 percent of its staff, plus 3,000 contractors. ConocoPhillips is cutting 20 to 25 percent. Imperial Oil is cutting a fifth of its people and shutting its Calgary office entirely. And in June, U.S. oil and gas extraction employment fell to 114,500 workers, the second-lowest June the Bureau of Labor Statistics has on record, beaten only by the pandemic bottom of 2021.
Production didn't fall; it's near record highs…but the jobs are disappearing anyway.
And before anyone assumes it’s renewable energy’s fault…it isn’t, not directly, at least. Nobody at Chevron got a pink slip because a wind farm opened next door. Automation, mergers, and a decade of investors who'd rather see returns than growth did this.
Ten Years, 72,800 Fewer Jobs
Back in January 2016, extraction employment topped out at 187,300, right before the price crash gutted the sector…
A decade on, the workforce sits almost 40 percent below that number, even while wells across the Permian and Eagle Ford keep breaking output records. This year alone tells the story in miniature… 115,500 in January, a bump to 116,200 in February, then a slide every month after, down to 114,500 by June.
The May-to-June dip isn't even new. Extraction jobs have fallen in that exact window in 7 of the last 11 years. Call it seasonal if you want. The floor keeps dropping every year regardless.
One footnote worth knowing: these figures get revised constantly. May's number came in at 115,600 first, then got walked back to 115,300 a month later. Treat any single month less like gospel and more like a rough read on direction.
Extraction, though, is the smaller of the two numbers that matter here.
Oilfield services, the drilling contractors, completions crews, pressure pumpers, employs something like 627,000 people, more than five times the extraction headcount, and it's been losing jobs even faster.
The ripple effects run deep, too…every upstream job is estimated to support roughly 232,000 supply chain jobs and 421,000 more through spending, more than 850,000 positions riding on an industry that keeps figuring out how to need fewer people directly.
The productivity data backs this up. Output per hour jumped 11.4 percent in 2023 while labor input barely budged, and total factor productivity swung from a 14.7 percent drop in 2021 to a 30.2 percent gain two years later. Nobody's working harder out there. They're working with better tools, and fewer of them.
Who's Actually Getting the Call
This year's layoff wave has less to do with oil prices than with a decade of mergers finally catching up.
Chevron's cuts, the largest in company history, are chasing $2 billion to $3 billion in savings from folding Hess into the existing operation.
“We do not take these actions lightly,” a spokesperson said, which is the sort of thing companies always say. BP is chasing a similar $2 billion target. ExxonMobil's cuts followed its own Pioneer deal. Merge two companies, and merging their field offices comes next, whether or not a single well changes how it produces. The services companies have a more familiar excuse…business has slowed. Halliburton has been cutting across at least three divisions this year, with some units down 20 to 40 percent. SLB has been through its own rounds of cuts and reshuffling. Both companies live and die by the rig count, and the rig count hasn't been kind.
There's a bit of irony buried in here, too. Chevron moved its headquarters from California to Houston back in 2024, calling it a bet on Texas. Some of this year's cuts landed on that same Houston campus.
West Texas Learns to Sell Electricity
Texas is the one place that complicates the whole story...
Upstream jobs there grew for three straight months into May, then reversed hard in June, down 1,500 to 2,000 positions, one of five negative months this year. And yet Texas posted 10,409 job listings in May, up 6 percent from April, more than any other state. Houston alone had nearly 2,700 listings.
Most of that hiring, by the way, sits in support activities and services, not extraction itself, the same layer of the industry absorbing the deepest cuts everywhere else.
What's really rewriting the Permian right now isn't drilling. It's electricity.
Microsoft is talking with Chevron and Engine No. 1 about a $7 billion gas plant near Pecos, built specifically to feed an AI data center, wired straight into Chevron's own gas wells instead of the overloaded Texas grid. A couple hundred miles east, OpenAI's Stargate campus in Abilene runs the same play… its own gas plant, no grid required. One of these data centers can use 5 to 6 million gallons of water a day, which works out to roughly 143,000 barrels in oilfield terms.
Basin boosters have started talking about exporting electricity instead of barrels. And that shift is already changing who gets hired locally: electricians, welders, power technicians, not another frack crew.
Pay Doesn't Match Who's Needed
Geoscientists earn a median $99.50 an hour, more than $206,000 a year.
Petroleum engineers aren't far off at $86.58.
Roustabouts, the entry-level hands doing the physical work on a wellsite, earn $23.30 an hour, under $49,000 a year. Wellhead pumpers make $36.62.
Guess which end of that range is disappearing fastest… It's the bottom.
And yet half of mining and extraction employers say they can't find enough electricians and skilled trades, even while total headcount shrinks.
That's not really about too few workers. It's about the wrong skills sitting in the wrong hands: a modern, automated wellsite runs on sensor systems, remote monitoring and predictive maintenance, not the training a lot of the existing workforce spent years building.
Veterans make up about 9 percent of the broader energy workforce, more than their share of the economy overall, and roughly three in ten energy workers are under 30. Both groups are exactly who geothermal startups and data center builders are trying to recruit right now.
Where the Skills Actually Go
None of this means oil and gas workers have nowhere to go. It means where they can go doesn't always match where they happen to be standing. Geothermal is the clearest match. A 2024 Energy Department estimate put the number of people who already have the drilling and subsurface skills geothermal needs at roughly 300,000.
The actual geothermal workforce today? Just 8,870. That gap is basically all headroom.
Drillers who've made the jump describe it as barely different work, still making a hole in the ground, still sealing it up, just chasing heat instead of hydrocarbons.
One driller who spent a decade in New England wells now runs drilling for a geothermal company and says the safety training and the technical chops carried over almost untouched. The Energy Department has put $171.5 million behind next-generation geothermal testing, and a federal advisory panel wants dedicated training centers built to move oil and gas crews over directly, plus a plan to keep veteran workers around as mentors so decades of unwritten wellsite knowledge doesn't walk out the door with them. Zoom out further and clean energy overall looks lopsided in a way that's easy to misread. Solar, wind, EVs, efficiency and grid work together employ 3.56 million people now, more than three times the roughly 1.9 million across oil, gas and coal, and growing about three times faster than the rest of the economy. Sounds like the obvious landing spot. Except the jobs aren't where the layoffs are. Researchers have documented a real geographic mismatch: the places losing oil and gas jobs and the places adding clean energy ones are rarely the same places, and workers don't relocate for a new job even when their skills transfer cleanly.
Texas is the case in point.
Its clean energy sector employs more than 283,000 people, but that's still only 29 percent of the state's total energy workforce. Even that growth has slowed, with policy rollbacks from this year's federal budget law putting an estimated 830,000 jobs at risk nationwide.
For most workers this isn't a straight line from a rig to a wind farm. It's whatever's actually nearby…a data center outside Abilene, a geothermal rig in New England, a services company retooling around software instead of headcount.
That doesn't make the industry disposable, either. A leaner oilfield is a more profitable one per worker, and people who survive a merger often land in better-paying, more specialized jobs than the ones they started in. It's a narrow set of job categories disappearing. Not the whole industry.
Same Industry. Fewer, Different Jobs.
The industry isn't dying…It's producing near-record volumes and probably will for a while. What's changed, though, is how few people it takes to hit those numbers, and which people those are. Fewer roughnecks, more automation technicians. Fewer roustabouts, more remote operations specialists. That pay gap is only going to get wider as the mix keeps shifting.
Whether anyone plans for it or not, the workforce is already sorting itself out.
By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com
What happens to pearl with the strait of Hormuz going to be permanently tolled/blocked.
Despite over 2,600 layoffs in Houston during the first half of 2026, the regional economy is showing resilience. High oil prices are significantly boosting the energy sector, a key driver of local employment. Economists note that Houston's economic acceleration is notable against a cooling national trend. The World Cup also contributed to job gains in sectors like leisure and hospitality. Overall, the job market is performing better than initially anticipated.
Houston, Texas
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/houston-layoffs-jobs-2026-22369185.php
All you other basins are not long for this company. It’s all about the Benjamins now babay
What’s the status of the re-org?
This will be the biggest reduction and change to staff at this site.
Will be interesting to see it play out.
Plenty fat. Top Heavy job roles
With every region in NAL losing money and LTF being down layoffs are coming this month. The writing is on the wall at this point, but which PSL’s or areas are going to be hit worse?
Is it just me or is there an active campaign to push out all of the upstream employees?
will the midcon asset survive, and if so what is the point of holding such an asset in the portfolio? - A holding corral for employees to be trained in and moved to more significant assets?
yes some people are being moved to the okc tower, but where will Devon be in 5 years? Constant re-orgs and layoffs have left Oklahoma hollowed out as a destination for oil and gas workers
First Marcellus, now, EF and Powder. That’s 12 billion in divestitures. Take that to the bank.
Still won’t help the share price.
Just an FYI:
Do we still need Exploration? Is EM still winning post Guyana?
Lessons learned from Hormuz conflict is that XOM needs secure LNG and Venture Global is the perfect fit. XOM was slow in January of 2026 where it could have bought it cheap…and most likely paid it off in short term
Lessons learned from Hormuz conflict is that XOM needs secure LNG and Venture Global is the perfect fit. XOM was slow in January of 2026 where it could have bought it cheap…and most likely paid it off in short term
Lessons learned from Hormuz conflict is that XOM needs secure LNG and Venture Global is the perfect fit. XOM was slow in January of 2026 where it could have bought it cheap…and most likely paid it off in short term
Shell can’t drill it’s self to prosperity so it’s levers are buy Shell stock, offload marginal production, and try to buy a company with existing production. Shell needs a big move within the next 6 months.
How’s a Woodside and Shell marriage? Certainly satisfy the Asia market while reduced investment in the ME.
How’s Kosmos? Cheap and get instant gas to Europe
Rex Tillerson recently visited LT with a very pessimistic outlook of market and economic prospects. He highlighted that factors leading to a black swan are highly probable. As we all know this will be a perfect opportunity for XOM to grow inorganically and further cement its position as a market leader.
What type of event do you predict?
Last time we were given the COVID crisis this time maybe consequential…nonsense or fortuitous?
Why would Oxy pay its Petro Technicals a very generous one time bonus unrelated to yearly goals or performance. Some top onshore and offshore engineers received +$60,000 for their efforts..
Your opinions?
Will COP follow the Oxy extra bonus?
Why would Oxy pay its Petro Technicals a very generous one time bonus unrelated to yearly goals or performance. Some top onshore and offshore engineers receives +60,000 for their efforts..
Your opinions?
I think the downfall really started back in 2016, everyone I speak (ys staff) is negative and tells me to sell my stocks now. After 2016 the company became bloated and started its India Journey and reducing quality and costs (it worked!!). At the same time it became a D&I playground for LHBTQI folks and as white male you were almost shamed for who you are and LT got targets getting more minorities and females promoted.
Good luck all, the good ones (you?) will find a better place their is al lot going on, just not in oil and gas anymore.
Sharing my research results:
Upstream & Exploration: Implementing a 20% headcount reduction across exploration, subsurface, and well-engineering teams over Q2 and Q3 2026.
Regions: Heavily hitting main administrative and technical hubs in Houston (USA), The Hague (Netherlands), and London/Aberdeen (UK).
Downstream & Chemicals: Downsizing operational footprints throughout 2026 to contain cash bleeding following multi-billion dollar losses in base chemical segments.
Regions: Layoffs and scale-backs target older processing infrastructure in Rotterdam (Netherlands), Stanlow (UK), and Monaca (USA), following a complete exit from Singapore assets.
Global Business Operations: Consolidating corporate back-offices and shifting away from generalized administrative roles.
Regions: Shared-service hubs in Continental Europe are affected, including roughly 300 job cuts executed at the Kraków (Poland) center in June 2026.
Low Carbon Solutions: Personnel cuts are occurring dynamically throughout 2026 as renewable projects are deferred or canceled.
Regions: Impacting project engineering and corporate green teams primarily across Northwest Europe (e.g., matching the construction pause at the Rotterdam biofuels facility).
It is natural to feel anxious when restructuring threatens your security, but corporate changes cannot diminish your personal value or expertise. While you cannot control executive decisions, you can reclaim power by auditing your wins, refreshing your resume, and reaching out to your network. Lean on the solid foundation of skills you own; companies change, but your capability remains.
3 weeks ago they warned of $140+ oil. Now we sit at $70.
I'm not only looking to leave EM, but the entire O&G industry. I can't find a single company that's better than this place, and I'm so tired of all the uncertainty, cyclical nature of the industry, toxicity, and everything else that comes with working here. I'm so done with it.
Why is ExxonMobil doing so poorly in Trading vs competition? What are we missing?
Shell & others seem to be doing much better.
Is our new trading organization, combined with the newly minted midstream company set to turn our fortunes around in this space?
Guyana the poster child for operational excellence is starting to show some signs of depletion and sand/water production. Maintaining an FPSO above 260,000 bopd for over 6 months is looking like an improbability. By September Exxon will have to purchase another company with substantial production and reserves. Who do you expect it to be?
Is it prudent to permit a BL favorite and boosted sycophant the opportunity to repair a broken organizational structure? BP is complex by design and by intent. Creative ideas and processes that are successful at other operating companies are frowned upon and sabotaged from the get go. Yet other operating companies that manage ex BP assets do so at a profit and discover and exploit the uplift left behind by people like GB
June 1, 2026 · Contributor
ExxonMobil has suspended operations at one of its chemical manufacturing plants in Singapore, citing unfavorable market conditions, according to report in local media. The decision to mothball the unit removes 900,000 metric tons per year of ethylene production capacity from the market.
ExxonMobil’s Singapore complex operates two steam cr--kers with a combined annual ethylene production capacity of 1.9 million metric tons. Cr--ker No. 2, which remains in operation, has capacity of 1 million metric tons per year.
The U.S.-based energy major said the affected facility is Cr--ker No. 1, one of two steam cr--kers it operates in Singapore. The unit, which began operations in 2002, has an annual ethylene production capacity of 900,000 metric tons.
“We will continue to work with our customers to meet their needs by leveraging our global asset base and product inventory. If market conditions improve, we have the capability to restart the unit,” the company said.
The shutdown highlights the pressure facing petrochemical producers as challenging market conditions continue to weigh on manufacturing economics. While ExxonMobil has idled the unit, the company indicated that the facility could be restarted if market conditions improve.
Ethylene is a key petrochemical building block used to manufacture a wide range of products, including synthetic lubricants and lubricant additives. In the lubricants sector, ethylene-derived materials are used in the production of certain synthetic base stocks, viscosity modifiers and performance additives that help improve efficiency, durability and temperature performance.
https://www.lubesngreases.com/lubereport-americas/11_22/weak-market-pushes-exxon-to-shut-singapore-cr--ker/
https://easternherald.com/2026/06/13/chevron-8000-layoffs-hess-acquisition-2026/
Any big announcements planned for the upstream/downstream meeting on Wednesday?
A general thread on who is hiring in O&G nowadays?
Lee Raymond, Who Created Exxon Mobil, Dies at 87
He oversaw Exxon’s acquisition of a rival, cut costs relentlessly and denied the scientific consensus on climate change.
Lee Raymond, the chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil Corp., at a news conference in 2005. A former high school debating champion, he was known for making withering remarks to those who challenged him.
Lee R. Raymond, who as chief executive of Exxon Mobil wrung out costs to make that global oil company the most profitable in its industry while stoutly resisting the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels was causing a potentially disastrous warming of the Earth, died on Saturday in Dallas. He was 87.
His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his son Colin, who said the cause was complications of pneumonia. Mr. Raymond’s agreement in 1998 to acquire Mobil — a transaction valued at about $81 billion, then the largest corporate merger ever — created the world’s biggest private-sector oil company in terms of annual
sales, operating in 200 countries. The deal reunited the two biggest parts of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil
Trust, sundered in 1911 by federal trust busters in an effort to spur competition. During his reign as chief executive, from 1993 to 2005, Mr. Raymond relentlessly cut costs, including eliminating a third of the executive jobs after the merger, and helped boost net income to $36.13 billion from $4.8 billion. The company’s market value increased fourfold to $375 billion.
Mr. Raymond shunned publicity. There was no discernible effort to make him seem endearing or personable to the general public or even to his own employees. He was known for making withering remarks in response to questions from employees or investment analysts. “What you’re hearing today may seem boring,” he said at an analyst meeting in March 2005. “You’ll just have to live with outstanding, consistent financial and operating performance.”
At company headquarters in Irving, Texas, he worked in a hushed office suite known as the God Pod, where a painting of a tiger hung behind his desk. Some employees nicknamed him “Iron A-s,” according to “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power,” a 2012 book by the journalist Steve Coll.
Before Mr. Raymond became chief executive, his biggest public role was taking charge of the company’s response after the Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground on a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in March 1989. The accident spilled 11 million gallons of crude and blackened 1,500 miles of coastline. Mr. Raymond, then Exxon’s president, oversaw the cleanup and, in 1991, helped negotiate a $1 billion settlement of federal and state legal charges arising from the spill. He accused environmentalists and politicians in Alaska of making the disaster worse by refusing to let Exxon spray chemical dispersants on the oil slick shortly after the spill.
In 1994, a federal jury in Anchorage ordered Exxon to pay $5 billion in punitive damages to about 34,000 fishermen and other Alaskans who said they were harmed by the spill. Exxon appealed, leading to another 14 years of litigation.
In a 2008 Supreme Court ruling, the damages were reduced to $500 million.
In the early 2000s, as BP and Chevron courted public favor by touting their investments in alternative energy sources, Exxon took a hard line against government restrictions on fossil fuels and funded research challenging the consensus on global warming.
Mr. Raymond, a former high school debating champion who had a Ph.D. degree in chemical engineering, considered himself a scientist with standing to question that consensus. In a 2005 interview with the public television host Charlie Rose, Mr. Raymond said there was a “natural variability” to temperatures on Earth over
millenniums. “If we weren’t here, the climate would change,” Mr. Raymond said. “It has to do with sunspots, it has to do with the wobble of the Earth, and it has — there are all kinds of things that come and go. If you talk to a geologist, he will tell you the Earth, over its history, has been much warmer than it is now and much colder.”
Because wind, solar and other alternative energy sources were costly and could not replace oil and gas in the near term, he argued, Exxon should focus on finding and pumping more oil, including, if possible, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
Environmentalists regularly denounced Exxon. “There is a spectrum of corporate behavior on global warming and Exxon is the epitome of denial and deception,” Kert Davies, then the research director at Greenpeace USA, told The New York Times in 2005.
Mr. Raymond also resisted corporate trends toward greater acceptance of g-y rights. After Exxon acquired Mobil, the combined company rescinded Mobil policies banning discrimination on the basis of s-xual orientation and ended a practice of providing benefits to same-s-x partners. The moves prompted some g-y and le----n drivers to boycott Exxon service stations.
Under Mr. Raymond’s successor, Rex Tillerson, Exxon Mobil adopted more inclusive policies and acknowledged that human activity contributed to climate change.
Mr. Raymond seemed unbothered by the unpopularity of his views. “I’ve never had a focus group to decide what my persona is out there,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 1997.
Nor did he wish to discuss his personal life. During a court hearing on the Valdez oil spill in the 1990s, an Exxon lawyer asked Mr. Raymond to sum up his background. “I hope this doesn’t get too boring,” Mr. Raymond said. “It kind of bores me.”
Mr. Raymond, center, addressed shareholders during an Exxon annual meeting in 1989. Nine years later, he oversaw the agreement to acquire Mobil.
Lee Roy Raymond was born in Watertown, S.D., on Aug. 13, 1938. His father, Clifford, a railroad engineer, encouraged the young man’s studious ways. In the 1997 interview, Mr. Raymond recalled his father’s alluding to a lack of opportunities in South Dakota and saying, “You have to get an education and get out of here.” After excelling in high school debate and extemporaneous speaking, Mr. Raymond enrolled at the University of Wisconsin and graduated in 1960 with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering.
He married Charlene Hocevar in 1961. They had three children, male triplets.
In addition to his wife and son Colin, he is survived by two other sons, John and Rob; and seven grandchildren. Mr. Raymond earned his doctorate in chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota in 1963 and joined Exxon the same year as a production research engineer in Tulsa, Okla. He later headed operations in Venezuela. In the mid-1970s, he impressed his bosses by turning an unprofitable refinery in Aruba into a
reliable source of profits.
After returning to the United States, he headed Exxon’s nuclear power business and oversaw the sale of a subsidiary selling office equipment, including Qyx electronic typewriters.
During his 12 years as chairman and chief executive, his compensation totaled more than $686 million, or $144,573 a day, according to an analysis done for The Times by Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant.
That compensation amounted to “entrepreneurial returns for managerial conduct,” Charles M. Elson, a corporate governance scholar at the University of Delaware, told The Times in 2006. “Exxon was there long before Mr. Raymond was there and will be there long after he leaves. Yet he received Rockefeller returns without taking the Rockefeller risk.”
An Exxon Mobil spokesman at the time said Mr. Raymond’s performance justified his pay. Mr. Raymond was a director of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its predecessor, J.P. Morgan & Co., for 33 years before stepping down in 2020. He also was on the board of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.
His hobbies included duck hunting and golf. In a 2013 interview with Investor’s Business Daily, he recalled having made three holes in one. On the corporate jet, he liked to drink milk with popcorn in it, Mr. Coll reported.
One of Mr. Raymond’s sons, John, co-founded Energy & Minerals Group, a private equity firm. “My father gave me three things,” John Raymond told The Journal in 2014. “He gave me work ethic, he gave me a good education and he gave me no money.”
Though Lee Raymond was known for his pugnacity, he had a softer side, according to Mr. Coll’s book: “He could be fiercely loyal to ExxonMobil colleagues and sometimes wept openly when subordinates faced illnesses or other personal struggles.”
It’s been over 1.5 years since COP purchased MRO and the question is- was it worth it? What were the positives and negatives? Is COP stronger and more agile now? What’s next?