Today’s announcement by drillers KCA Deutag that they are looking to cut 230 jobs in their Aberdeen and North Sea from a total of 500 jobs to go worldwide.
The breakdown of the 230 jobs to go will be around 30 in Aberdeen and the other 200 offshore.
This brings to 2,245 the total number of jobs losses announced to date in the North Sea oil and gas industry and its HQ of Aberdeen.
This is made up of:
- 225 – from Chevron
- 250 – from Royal Dutch Shell
- 350 – from ConocoPhillips
- 250 – from Apache
- 300 – from BP
- 100 – from Schlumberger
- 130 – from Talisman Energy [100 offshore, 30 onshore]
- 100 – from Baker Hughes Inteq [employs 417, with 25% to go]
- 300 – from Talisman Sinopec -100 staff and 200 contractors]
- 230 – from KCA Deutag [3o onshore and 200 offshore].
While the mounting totals of job losees affect the economic performance of Scotland and the United Kingdom, the challenge is less finding jobs for, to date, 2,243 people [with more to come] than it is with the serious loss of skills involved.
In this industry there are plenty of jobs around the world for the offshore workers. They lose jobs here? They pick up their passports and go elsewhere.
If the price of oil stays low for the two to three years many analysts predict and upon which many oil companies are clearly basing their decision taking, old and borderline fields that are shut down in this retraction will not open again.
On top of that, when extraction and exploration return to the UK Continental Shelf, a serious worry in the light of the level of job losses anticipated, is the availability at that later stage of workers with the specialist skills required.
