Let me guess where the oil industry will find the cheap labor they seek?
Can you say amnesty.
It takes a long time to train new drillers, petroleum engineers and construction specialists, and give them the experience needed before they can assume positions as experts and team leaders.
Sure, I’ll guess.
They’ll find it coming out of China factories, in the form of robots. Society, including the oil industry, will automate its way to oblivion as a smaller and smaller employment base has to pay welfare and unemployment benefits for a larger and larger base of the jobless.
BTW this avalanche of data indicating . . . paraphrasing from 1995 to 2005 the oil industry spent $9 billion to get 10 million bpd of global production. From 2005 to now, $200 billion has generated 2 million bpd of added production . . . started with Total last week.
It is a profoundly ominous thing.
This is not so much about labor as it is about suppliers pricing of hard goods. Pipe that used to cost 20 bucks a foot is now 60 a foot(put 15,000 feet of that in a hole), wire line has gone out of sight, steel, sucker rods, pump jacks, all have gone crazy in prices just as in or around any boom. Hookers are gonna get theirs and the grocer even gets his pound when a boom is going on.
These times of “adjusted reality check” are not uncommon in the “awl field” to get suppliers back to reality and things a little more liveable.