Energy company to move 1,600 workers to area
Exxon Mobil’s shale drilling unit will shift a third of its workforce to its local campus
XTO Energy, the shale drilling arm of Exxon Mobil, plans to shift a third of its domestic workforce from Fort Worth to the Houston area, further expanding Exxon’s footprint here.
Energy, the shale drilling arm of Exxon Mobil Corp., plans to shift a third of its domestic workforce from Fort Worth to the Houston area in coming years, further expanding Exxon Mobil’s footprint in the U.S. energy capital.
Exxon Mobil, which snapped up the largest U.S. shale gas producer in a $31 billion stock deal in 2010, will relocate 1,600 employees, including geologists, engineers, accountants and land administrators, to its sprawling campus near The Woodlands starting in mid-2018, a move that puts the unit’s headquarters north of Houston after more than three decades in Fort Worth.
XTO will follow a number of others that in recent years have rotated high-paying jobs into Houston, the city with the nation’s highest concentration of oil and gas producers, energy services providers, oil equipment makers, fabricated metal shops and engineering firms that employ tens of thousands across the region. Between late 2014 and late 2016, however, Houston lost some 80,000 jobs in both the oil industry and businesses that support it during a downturn in oil prices, but producers shifted some of their operations into Houston from faraway places like Singapore and Norway — a pattern that goes back to the oil bust of the 1980s. Last week, for
example, Houston oil company Noble Energy said it planned to shift 100 jobs into Houston and Greeley, Colo., from its Denver offices.
“When the industry contracts, it often contracts back into Houston,” said Patrick Jankowski, senior vice president of the Greater Houston Partnership. “It’s easier to manage things when they’re closer to home than when they’re far-flung. They’re managing overseas projects from here.”
XTO Energy said about 1,200 workers will move to the campus near The Woodlands in mid-2018, with another 400 following in mid-2020, joining some 9,000 employees that Exxon Mobil already has there downstream. Having XTO’s main workforce in the 385-acre campus will let the shale drilling team collaborate more often with Exxon Mobil’s upstream research company, XTO spokeswoman Suann Guthrie said.
“We want all of our employees to relocate,” she said. “We’re not consolidating. We looked at how we can be better as an organization.”
The move to the Houston area will involve selling off 600,000 square feet of office space in six of XTO’s seven buildings in Fort Worth over the next few years, though XTO Energy will keep about 350 employees in North Texas to run its Barnett Shale operations near Fort Worth, as well as its midstream business.
Guthrie added XTO isn’t moving away from Fort Worth because it doesn’t want to do business there.
The shale driller, founded in 1986 as Cross Timbers, has about 5,000 employees across the United States and was snapped up by Exxon seven years ago as the world’s largest publicly traded oil company bought its way into the U.S. shale gas boom.
XTO Energy also has begun shifting other workers closer to its oil field operations in places like North Dakota and West Texas.
In Denver, for example, it plans to shut down its offices in September and relocate employees closer to its operations in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale. And in West Texas, it recently created a division focused on the Delaware Basin, where Exxon Mobil purchased 275,000 acres for $6.6 billion from the wealthy Bass family of Fort Worth.
“Now that Exxon has paid top dollar to go into the Permian, it makes a lot of sense to finish consolidating the Exxon staff into The Woodlands campus,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston.