There's both good news and bad news about the oil industry, but bad news sells more newspapers, which is why you hear news about oil rig companies like Schlumberger laying off 5000 workers and Halliburton planning to cut some jobs. On the other hand, good news like Noble Corporation and Transocean rolling out 15 new oil rigs and hiring up to 3000 workers gets buried deep in the financial pages, reserved for the eyes of investors.


Make no mistake, some companies are retrenching workers because of the economy. But there are other companies still hiring - offshore drilling companies like Transocean. When they merged with GlobalSantaFe back in 2007, they had a combined outstanding order book of $33 billion. That is a lot of work waiting for workers to complete.

Despite their reported layoffs, a leak from one of Schlumberger's business units claims that it has an outstanding order book of at least $1.77 billion. That is a lot of work left to be completed, and doesn't even take into account the outstanding orders held by their other business units.

On its own, Exxon plans to spend $150 billion over the next 5 years looking for new oil fields and upgrading their existing oil rigs and refineries. Even with a recession going on, they are spending $79 million everyday just oil exploration. Worldwide, oil companies spending $400 billion in 2009 just looking for new oil fields. Some of that work has already produced results - three new oil fields have been found in Brazil.

There is still a lot of work left in the oil industry. The demand for oil from mature First World economies is stable, but the demand for oil from the Asian giants is still on an upward trend. The Asian Development Bank expects both the giant economies of China and India to still grow at 6.5% and 5% respectively. This is just a worse case scenario, and it is still better than the growth from Europe during the peak of the economy. The International Energy Agency analysts predict that both India and China will consume 300% more oil by 2030, and that China will beat the US as the world's largest energy user in 2020. The IEA also estimate that the world needs to invest at least $20 trillion over the next 25 years to this increase in energy demand and to make up for the decline of the world's major oil fields.

As can be seen, there is plenty of demand left for oil. This means there will be jobs available - if you know where to look. Remember that too many offshore drilling jobs are still being filled by workers hired in the 1970s. They are getting old and will be retiring in the next few years, so oil rig companies will need to hire new workers for offshore oil rig jobs and roustabout jobs whether they like it or not. Although Schlumberger provided no details, this last fact suggests that they are relying on attrition from retiring workers for at least part of their staff cuts.

For job seekers, prospects of jobs from oil rig companies remain bright, both short term and long term. Short term, during the recession, job seekers need to work harder and smarter to find offshore drilling jobs.

By: Calvin Loh