Oil recovering in Texas, but not all its positions
IN THE land where oil jobs were once a guaranteed road to security for blue-collar workers, Eustasio Velazquez’s career has been upended by technology. For 10 years, he laid cables for service companies doing seismic testing in the search for the next big gusher. Then, powerful computer hardware and software replaced cables with wireless data collection, and he lost his job. He found new work connecting pipes on rigs, but lost that job, too, when plunging oil prices in 2015 forced the driller he worked for to replace rig hands with cheaper, more reliable automated tools.
Oil workers have traditionally had some of the highest-paying blue-collar jobs – just the type President Trump has vowed to preserve and bring back. But the West Texas oil fields, where activity is gearing back up as prices rebound, illustrate how difficult it will be to meet that goal.
As in other industries, automation is creating new demand for high-tech workers – sometimes hundreds of kilometres away in a control centre – but their numbers don’t offset the ranks of hands no longer required to sling chains and lift iron.
So while there is a general sense of relief in the oil patch that a recovery is gaining momentum, discussions at company meetings and family kitchen tables are rife with aching worries, especially among those who are middle-age with no more than a high school education.
Roughly 163,000 oil jobs were lost na- tionally from the 2014 peak, or about 30 percent of the total, while oil prices plummeted, at one point by as much as 70 percent. The job losses just in Texas, totalled 98,000.
Several thousand workers have come back to work in recent months as the price of oil has begun to rise again, but experts say that between a third and a half of the workers who lost their jobs are not returning. Many have migrated to construction.
“People have left the industry, and they are not coming back,” said Michael Dy- nan, vice president for portfolio and strategic development at Schramm, a Pennsylvania manufacturer of drilling rigs. “If it’s a repetitive task, it can be automated, and I don’t need someone to do that. I can get a computer to do that.”
And despite all the lost workers, US oil production is galloping upward, to nine million barrels a day from 8.6 million in September. Nationwide, with a bit more than a third as many rigs operating as in 2014, production is not even down 10 percent.