Guntis Moritis
Production Editor
AMSTERDAM, Feb. 19 -- The frequently cited shortage of qualified technical personnel in the oil and gas industry is not as dire a situation as is often claimed, according to a speaker at a drilling conference panel here.
John Gibson, president of Halliburton Energy Services, made the comment at a panel discussion during the Society of Petroleum Engineers-International Association of Drilling Contractors joint drilling conference.
Personnel concerns
Gibson said the industry is going through a change that involves replacement of North American and Western European expatriates with less-costly personnel from other parts of the world, especially to work in the country of their origin. He said these new employees sometimes require additional training to acquaint them with Western technologies and procedures, but they are as competent as their western counterparts.
As an example, he cited an Egyptian national named recently as Halliburton employee of the year.
Gibson also said that although productivity increased rapidly after the loss of about 415,000 jobs in the US industry in the 1980s, productivity now has hit a plateau for the last decade, averaging about 600-700 bo/d produced per employee in the US.
To increase productivity, Gibson said the industry needs new tools to decrease the 7 years of experience now thought to be required for a person to make good decisions. The pace of learning and cross-training have to increase to reduce this learning curve, he said.
Increasing supply
Tony Meggs, group vice-president, technology, for BP PLC, said the continued growth every year of proven oil and gas reserves shows the world will not run out of these energy sources in the 2003-20 period that the panel discussed.
He said he expects that demand during this timeframe might start to moderate as the world tries to deal with the additional carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere from burning these fossil fuels.
Increased access to prospects and better technologies that increase recovery factors and drilling results are factors Meggs cited as helping maintain the continued increase in reserves while producing greater amounts each year.
Drilling improvements
Technology also has driven improvements in drilling, according to Larry Dickerson, president and chief operating officer of Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc., Houston.
He said he is especially proud of the safety improvements made in the drilling industry. As an example, he said lost-time incident rates decreased to 0.67 incidents/200,000 hr worked in 2001 from 5.32 incidents/200,000 hr in 1982. He sees continued increases in safety but at a slower rate in the future because of the law of diminishing returns.
Dickerson said some technologies on the horizon that will impact drilling productivity gains are expandable tubulars, dual-gradient drilling, continued deepwater experience, robotics, and nanotechnologies. He said reducing the number of people manning a rig would not make productivity gains. The current manning level is what is required to run a rig, he said.
Dickerson also sees no major rig-building effort in at least the next 10 years. And he said the right wages will bring in a sufficient labor supply to man the rigs.
