Oil & Gas Producers NAICS 2111

Jun 27, 2025 - Drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska

• The Trump administration has moved to open 23 million acres of Alaskan Wilderness to drilling by repealing protections imposed by the Biden administration, The New York Times reports. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the previous administration exceeded its authority when it banned oil and gas drilling in the area known as the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The petroleum reserve, established over a century ago as an energy warehouse for the US Navy, is estimated to contain more than 8 billion barrels of recoverable oil. The Bureau of Land Management has released a draft environmental assessment to propose reopening up to 82% of the reserve to oil and gas leasing and exploration and development. The proposal comes partly in response to Trump’s January executive order, “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential," the Interior statement said. The area is home to ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil field, approved under Biden.
• Amid tumbling oil prices and the lure of cheaper labor overseas, oil companies are offshoring white-collar jobs, The Wall Street Journal reported in April. Major oil producers, including Chevron, BP, and others, are offshoring prized, specialized white-collar positions and related work to lower-cost labor pools in countries such as India, while cutting thousands of jobs elsewhere. In February, Houston-based Chevron announced it would cut its global workforce up to 20% – or roughly 8,000 jobs – by the end of 2026. Concurrently, the company said it would expand the use of global centers like its one in India where it plans to add about 600 jobs by the end of this year, according to WSJ. Engineers in India earn salaries around a third or a fourth the size of their US counterparts. US oil-and-gas jobs have dropped almost 15% since mid-2019, according to the Labor Department.

• Oil and gas production companies are expanding offshore drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico in part because doing so releases fewer greenhouse gases than drilling on land, The New York Times reports. Industry executives are betting on sustained demand for oil and gas for years to come and argue that offshore drilling is better for the climate than drilling on land because offshore operations emit far less greenhouse gases than producing the same amount of oil and gas on land, according to NYT. The greenhouse gas emissions associated with extracting a barrel of oil from the Gulf of Mexico are as much as a third lower than emissions from producing a barrel of oil from fields on US soil, according to a report published last year by the National Ocean Industries Association, an industry group for offshore oil, gas, and wind businesses, cited by NYT.
• Producer prices for oil and gas extraction firms fell 7.7% in May compared to a year ago after rising 6.6% in the previous May-versus-May annual comparison, according to the latest US Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Industry producer prices have tumbled 54% from their peak in June 2022, after the price per barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude climbed to $114.82 in May 2022. Employment by oil and gas extraction firms was flat year over year in May, while the average industry wage fell 3.2% in April to $43.24 per hour, down $1.42 from its peak in April of last year, BLS data show.