{"id":59919,"date":"2023-06-06T07:10:34","date_gmt":"2023-06-06T14:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/energi.media\/?p=59919"},"modified":"2023-06-06T07:10:34","modified_gmt":"2023-06-06T14:10:34","slug":"alberta-oil-and-gas-jobs-machine-permanently-broken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/energi.media\/energi-notes\/alberta-oil-and-gas-jobs-machine-permanently-broken\/","title":{"rendered":"Alberta oil and gas jobs machine permanently broken"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alberta oil patch labour force of 100,000 by 2030 isn\u2019t hard to imagine. Big drop from peak of 171,300 just a decade ago<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Last week, Suncor announced plans to <\/span>lay off <\/span><\/a>1,500 employees, nine per cent of its head count, while Imperial Oil will <\/span>cut<\/span><\/a> 200 jobs. Hard to imagine more layoffs aren\u2019t on the way. Volatile crude oil prices are partly to blame. But the real culprit is a decade-long trend affecting most oil and gas workforces: technology change.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cDoes it take as many employees as we once had in the upstream oil and gas business to produce amounts of crude oil that are presently in demand by the marketplace?\u201d Texas Alliance of Energy Producers economist Karr Ingham <\/span>told<\/span><\/a> me back in 2018. \u201cI\u2019m not sure the answer to that question is yes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Turns out the answer was a resounding, no. Over the past nine years, Texas lost 110,000 upstream oil and gas jobs. Alberta lost 45,000 – from 171,000 to 126,000 – over the same period. Those jobs are not coming back. In fact, as Suncor and Imperial demonstrate, employment numbers appear poised to continue falling.<\/span><\/p>\n

In late 2020, I interviewed Lance Mortlach of international consulting firm EY about his study that showed Canadian oil and gas employment would drop 30 per cent (roughly 50,000 jobs) by 2040. There\u2019s also a radical change in how oil and gas employees do their work. Increasingly, computers and machines are actually doing the work and humans are supervising the technology.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Source<\/a>: PetroLMI.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWe continue to see examples of process automation like the heavy haul trucks in oil sands,\u201d Mortlach said. \u201cThat’s a great test case, and I think shovels will follow suit.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What he meant by \u201cshovels\u201d was physical, repetitive jobs, especially if there is an opportunity to increase worker safety. For example, pumpers used to drive from well to well each day checking that the equipment was working properly and that there were no significant leaks. Now, monitoring well performance is increasingly done remotely using sensors (including video cameras) that send data to the cloud, where head office technicians download and analyze it using sophisticated analytics software.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jobs that require \u201cwindshield time,\u201d as they call it in the oil patch, are a thing of the past.<\/span><\/p>\n

Engineer Dave Shook has spent the last 20 years designing the automation systems that the oil companies are using to eliminate jobs. He said in 2020 that he wouldn\u2019t be surprised if the job losses forecast by Mortlach happened by 2025.<\/span><\/p>\n