Oil & Gas Producers NAICS 2111

Apr 27, 2025 - Big Oil Offshoring Jobs

• 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.
• The post-election mood in the oil and gas industry is one of high optimism, according to The American Oil & Gas Reporter. “It borders on exuberant,” described Karr Ingham, president of Texas Alliance of Energy Producers. There’s a sense of relief in the industry that the Biden administration’s anti-fossil-fuels approach will soon be in the past. The national trade association for the oil and gas industry, the American Petroleum Institute, has a roadmap for the Trump administration that includes swiftly authorizing liquified natural gas exports, expanding drilling on federal lands, making pipeline permitting easier, repealing strict vehicle emissions and fuel economy standards, and keeping current corporate tax rates in place. Trump has said he’ll create a National Energy Council to “oversee the path to US energy dominance,” and has tapped Doug Bergum, governor of oil-rich North Dakota to head the Interior 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.
• Employment by oil and gas extraction firms was relatively flat in February compared to a year ago, while average industry wages fell 3.6% year over year in January to $42.55 per hour, according to the latest US Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Industry payrolls eased amid rising producer prices for oil and gas extraction firms, which increased by 2.6% in December year over year, according to the BLS. Industry producer prices skyrocketed from the onset of the pandemic until mid-2022, when gas prices peaked, but have since come down to earth.