Chevron is cutting up to 9,000 jobs this year. That's a fifth of its global workforce, gone, while it digests the $53 billion Hess deal. ExxonMobil trimmed 2,000. BP shed more than 5 percent of its staff, plus 3,000 contractors. ConocoPhillips is cutting 20 to 25 percent. Imperial Oil is cutting a fifth of its people and shutting its Calgary office entirely. And in June, U.S. oil and gas extraction employment fell to 114,500 workers, the second-lowest June the Bureau of Labor Statistics has on record, beaten only by the pandemic bottom of 2021.
Production didn't fall; it's near record highs…but the jobs are disappearing anyway.
And before anyone assumes it’s renewable energy’s fault…it isn’t, not directly, at least. Nobody at Chevron got a pink slip because a wind farm opened next door. Automation, mergers, and a decade of investors who'd rather see returns than growth did this.
Ten Years, 72,800 Fewer Jobs
Back in January 2016, extraction employment topped out at 187,300, right before the price crash gutted the sector…
A decade on, the workforce sits almost 40 percent below that number, even while wells across the Permian and Eagle Ford keep breaking output records. This year alone tells the story in miniature… 115,500 in January, a bump to 116,200 in February, then a slide every month after, down to 114,500 by June.
The May-to-June dip isn't even new. Extraction jobs have fallen in that exact window in 7 of the last 11 years. Call it seasonal if you want. The floor keeps dropping every year regardless.
One footnote worth knowing: these figures get revised constantly. May's number came in at 115,600 first, then got walked back to 115,300 a month later. Treat any single month less like gospel and more like a rough read on direction.
Extraction, though, is the smaller of the two numbers that matter here.
Oilfield services, the drilling contractors, completions crews, pressure pumpers, employs something like 627,000 people, more than five times the extraction headcount, and it's been losing jobs even faster.
The ripple effects run deep, too…every upstream job is estimated to support roughly 232,000 supply chain jobs and 421,000 more through spending, more than 850,000 positions riding on an industry that keeps figuring out how to need fewer people directly.
The productivity data backs this up. Output per hour jumped 11.4 percent in 2023 while labor input barely budged, and total factor productivity swung from a 14.7 percent drop in 2021 to a 30.2 percent gain two years later. Nobody's working harder out there. They're working with better tools, and fewer of them.
Who's Actually Getting the Call
This year's layoff wave has less to do with oil prices than with a decade of mergers finally catching up.
Chevron's cuts, the largest in company history, are chasing $2 billion to $3 billion in savings from folding Hess into the existing operation.
“We do not take these actions lightly,” a spokesperson said, which is the sort of thing companies always say.
BP is chasing a similar $2 billion target. ExxonMobil's cuts followed its own Pioneer deal.
Merge two companies, and merging their field offices comes next, whether or not a single well changes how it produces.
The services companies have a more familiar excuse…business has slowed.
Halliburton has been cutting across at least three divisions this year, with some units down 20 to 40 percent. SLB has been through its own rounds of cuts and reshuffling. Both companies live and die by the rig count, and the rig count hasn't been kind.
There's a bit of irony buried in here, too. Chevron moved its headquarters from California to Houston back in 2024, calling it a bet on Texas. Some of this year's cuts landed on that same Houston campus.
West Texas Learns to Sell Electricity
Texas is the one place that complicates the whole story...
Upstream jobs there grew for three straight months into May, then reversed hard in June, down 1,500 to 2,000 positions, one of five negative months this year. And yet Texas posted 10,409 job listings in May, up 6 percent from April, more than any other state. Houston alone had nearly 2,700 listings.
Most of that hiring, by the way, sits in support activities and services, not extraction itself, the same layer of the industry absorbing the deepest cuts everywhere else.
What's really rewriting the Permian right now isn't drilling. It's electricity.
Microsoft is talking with Chevron and Engine No. 1 about a $7 billion gas plant near Pecos, built specifically to feed an AI data center, wired straight into Chevron's own gas wells instead of the overloaded Texas grid.
A couple hundred miles east, OpenAI's Stargate campus in Abilene runs the same play… its own gas plant, no grid required.
One of these data centers can use 5 to 6 million gallons of water a day, which works out to roughly 143,000 barrels in oilfield terms.
Basin boosters have started talking about exporting electricity instead of barrels. And that shift is already changing who gets hired locally: electricians, welders, power technicians, not another frack crew.
Pay Doesn't Match Who's Needed
Geoscientists earn a median $99.50 an hour, more than $206,000 a year.
Petroleum engineers aren't far off at $86.58.
Roustabouts, the entry-level hands doing the physical work on a wellsite, earn $23.30 an hour, under $49,000 a year. Wellhead pumpers make $36.62.
Guess which end of that range is disappearing fastest… It's the bottom.
And yet half of mining and extraction employers say they can't find enough electricians and skilled trades, even while total headcount shrinks.
That's not really about too few workers. It's about the wrong skills sitting in the wrong hands: a modern, automated wellsite runs on sensor systems, remote monitoring and predictive maintenance, not the training a lot of the existing workforce spent years building.
Veterans make up about 9 percent of the broader energy workforce, more than their share of the economy overall, and roughly three in ten energy workers are under 30. Both groups are exactly who geothermal startups and data center builders are trying to recruit right now.
Where the Skills Actually Go
None of this means oil and gas workers have nowhere to go. It means where they can go doesn't always match where they happen to be standing.
Geothermal is the clearest match. A 2024 Energy Department estimate put the number of people who already have the drilling and subsurface skills geothermal needs at roughly 300,000.
The actual geothermal workforce today? Just 8,870. That gap is basically all headroom.
Drillers who've made the jump describe it as barely different work, still making a hole in the ground, still sealing it up, just chasing heat instead of hydrocarbons.
One driller who spent a decade in New England wells now runs drilling for a geothermal company and says the safety training and the technical chops carried over almost untouched.
The Energy Department has put $171.5 million behind next-generation geothermal testing, and a federal advisory panel wants dedicated training centers built to move oil and gas crews over directly, plus a plan to keep veteran workers around as mentors so decades of unwritten wellsite knowledge doesn't walk out the door with them.
Zoom out further and clean energy overall looks lopsided in a way that's easy to misread.
Solar, wind, EVs, efficiency and grid work together employ 3.56 million people now, more than three times the roughly 1.9 million across oil, gas and coal, and growing about three times faster than the rest of the economy. Sounds like the obvious landing spot.
Except the jobs aren't where the layoffs are.
Researchers have documented a real geographic mismatch: the places losing oil and gas jobs and the places adding clean energy ones are rarely the same places, and workers don't relocate for a new job even when their skills transfer cleanly.
Texas is the case in point.
Its clean energy sector employs more than 283,000 people, but that's still only 29 percent of the state's total energy workforce. Even that growth has slowed, with policy rollbacks from this year's federal budget law putting an estimated 830,000 jobs at risk nationwide.
For most workers this isn't a straight line from a rig to a wind farm. It's whatever's actually nearby…a data center outside Abilene, a geothermal rig in New England, a services company retooling around software instead of headcount.
That doesn't make the industry disposable, either. A leaner oilfield is a more profitable one per worker, and people who survive a merger often land in better-paying, more specialized jobs than the ones they started in. It's a narrow set of job categories disappearing. Not the whole industry.
Same Industry. Fewer, Different Jobs.
The industry isn't dying…It's producing near-record volumes and probably will for a while. What's changed, though, is how few people it takes to hit those numbers, and which people those are. Fewer roughnecks, more automation technicians. Fewer roustabouts, more remote operations specialists. That pay gap is only going to get wider as the mix keeps shifting.
Whether anyone plans for it or not, the workforce is already sorting itself out.
By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com
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