Deep-water drillers face ‘significant reset’
As OTC approaches, many in the industry ‘just starting to feel the pain,’ experts say
As crude prices plunged and layoffs spread, the offshore drilling industry still buzzed with activity based on investments made years before the downturn began. But now that backlog of orders is running thin for equipment manufacturers as the worst energy crash in 30 years drags on.
At Houston’s National Oilwell Varco, which already has shed more than 10,000 jobs and closed dozens of factories, the backlog of rig-equipment orders is expected to shrink from $15 billion two years ago to $2.6 billion by the end of the year. Another Houston manufacturer, FMC-Technologies, could see outstanding orders cut by nearly two-thirds in 2016.
“That hole in the backlog is going to be there for a long time,” said Robert Sullivan, a managing director at consulting firm AlixPartners in New York. “Some of those companies are really just starting to feel the pain.”
The offshore drilling industry has reached a turning point as it contends with an extended period of low oil prices. As tens of thousands of oil and gas professionals come to Houston this week for the annual Offshore Technology Conference, they face the daunting challenge of reinventing their industry into lower cost producers to com-
pete with more efficient dry land operations.
“There’s a significant reset going on in the industry right now,” said Ahmed Hashmi, BP’s global head of upstream technology.
The reset for offshore drilling could take years, and the reverberations will be felt across Houston’s celebrated energy sector. On Thursday, for example, ConocoPhillips, the third-largest U.S. oil company, said it won’t drill two planned deep-water wells in the Gulf of Mexico, adding to the $150 billion in offshore projects that oil companies have already delayed, according to energy research firm Wood Mackenzie.
Ultimately, analysts say, companies will develop better technologies, increased efficiency, more automation — and fewer jobs. In the meantime, drillers are abandoning deep-sea expeditions, mothballing major offshore projects, laying off thousands, and leaving some 16 billion barrels of crude behind for the industry’s next generation.
Exploration drilling, Wood Mackenzie estimates, could fall by as much as 30 percent this year alone. Last month, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management drew among the fewest bids for new drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico in three decades. 1 in 5 jobs shed
As a result, manufacturers like National Oilwell Varco, which employs 9,000 in Houston, and FMC Technologies, which has 3,200 local employees, stand to lose billions of dollars in business, with no immediate recovery in sight.
“Oil could go to $70 tomorrow and it really wouldn’t change the trajectory of offshore drilling at all,” said David Anderson, an analyst at Barclays. “All (companies) can do right now is wind down as much labor as possible.”
The U.S. oil and gas industry has shed one in five oil jobs since the downturn began, according to the Federal Reserve. Rig con- tractors, service companies and equipment suppliers for American companies have shed more than 247,000 jobs around the world, and deep-water equipment makers will have to cut more workers to survive, analysts said.
The oil industry pumps about one-third of the world’s crude from wells on the ocean floor and spends one-third of its money on offshore installations. In 2014, when prices topped $100 a barrel, drillers spent $700 billion plumbing the earth for crude, taking on massive debt to finance the work.
During this period, offshore labor and equipment costs soared, but few investors cared as profits rolled in and the industry enjoyed the biggest domestic boom in 40 years.
Now, with oil prices at $45, investors have soured on multibillion-dollar ventures in frontier regions, and global oil spending has fallen by $300 billion, according to the French oil company Total S.A. At a plant in northwest Houston, GE Oil & Gas is waiting to deploy the last six-story blowout preventer system it has on order.
Offshore costs have come down recently, but not nearly as fast as those of shale oil drillers. Even when crude prices recover, some oil companies such as Chevron Corp. will likely prefer to invest in less expensive, lowerrisk shale fields than expensive deep-water projects, at least for a while.
“They’re such high cost,” Julie Wilson, research director of global exploration at Wood Mackenzie in Houston, said of offshore wells. “Nobody wants to commit to that right now.”
Adding to the industry’s woes is an oversupply of equipment on the market, including boats, helicopters and rigs. That means new orders will be slow in coming. Dril-Quip, a Houston field services company, could see its backlog of equipment orders fall to $400 million from $1.3 billion in the first half of 2014, according to the financial services firm Barclays.
Executives at FMC said last week they don’t expect any contracts over the next two years to be considered so-called megaprojects worth more than $500 million. Also last week, National Oilwell Varco reported that it lost $21 million in the first quarter and cut nearly 6,000 jobs in the first three months of the year.
“There are a lot of very smart people trying to make this more efficient,” Chief Executive Clay Williams told the Chronicle. “I can’t tell you when the recovery is going to come, but it’s out there.” Old fields, new standards
The industry will wrestle over how to ride out the downturn at the Offshore Technology Conference. One approach: Drilling fewer offshore exploration wells and squeezing more crude out of existing ones. That trend could boost the manufacturing of tools to increase production from aging fields.
“A much higher share of what we produce in the future is going to come from existing fields than has come over the last 20 years,” BP’s Hamshi said. “The majority of the world’s basins are discovered, and the discoveries are getting smaller. There’s so much life left in the mature fields.”
Another cost-saving idea that has gained traction is standardizing equipment that connects drilling rigs and production platforms to oil wells miles underwater. For years, big oil companies had ordered customized equipment in an array of different specifications, relying on their own engineers to come up with new designs for each project. Standardizing equipment that could be used for many projects could lower design and production costs.
“Every now and then the industry needs something like this,” said Brad Beitler, vice president of technology at FMC Technologies. “When you go as hot and heavy as we have for the past six to eight years, we need to take stock of where we are.”