i have worked offshore now approx 10 years. my mates are also working offshore in uk , europe and a couple in asia. north sea has now come to a complete standstill, nothing is happening at all. rigs are being pulled into storage yards. ensco drilling in north sea amoung others are quiet and laid many workers off . so have stork, salamis etc. there was allways work for me in the dutch sector but there too is quiet with many pay offs.

im listening to some old timers who say this is a lull that comes around every 8 years or so, the last one was apparently in 1987 before that in the late 70,s though i cannot remember a recession like this offshore.

has this recession anything to do with oil prices ? has it anything to do with the turmoil in middle east, syria,iraq and isil ?

do you think things will pick up and when ?

your views please.

Maybe you do not get off the rig very often. But there is a large surplus of oil at the moment driving prices down.Production has slowed drastically. Many of my family have oil generated incomes. they own the water trucks that supply the rigs and run the pilot cars for the moving rigs and other are in radiology which is xraying of pipelines etc. All of them are suffering. I am surprised the off shore rigs are still working to be honest.

I'm told that the Oil Price is dropping/has dropped will continue to drop because the Saudi's have flooded the market with their plentiful supply because the Saudi government and Royal Family have spent up, they've publicly stated that they can afford to keep spewing out oil until the price hits $20.

There is still work going on in other places because their crude needs blending with other varieties to be commercially used and some companies are probably of a the view that they will finish off the drilling they've committed to and will leave it at that until they start again, others are tied into continuing to work as part of the licencing agreement when they bid for the rights to work some territories. But on the whole people are sitting tight. I was told 10 years ago that the North Sea is only viable at $60-65 dollars a barrel, that may be higher now.

If I were a decision maker in an oil company at the moment I'd take the view that it might be a good job to go exploring because labor and hardware can be sourced cheaply at the moment. I'm confident prices will rise again, in the meantime does anybody need their carpets cleaning ?

I guess you have to blame this on the USA for having so much cheap oil

You and others trough their was something and peak oil

You wake up the USA business man to get oil from shale

those Dam Yankees did it again

the goal of cheap fuel is to kill Isis. they can not simply get good money from their stolen fuel. if Isis is one day out of the picture, fuel price will go up.

Edited January 8, 201610 yr by papayasalad

Yep, not much work around in subsea construction just now. When I finish my contract here in Singapore in June, I'm taking a year off to chill out back in Thailand and see what happens.

the goal of cheap fuel is to kill Isis. they can not simply get good money from their stolen fuel. if Isis is one day out of the picture, fuel price will go up.

you reckon ?

ok...............who thinks the industry will get back up and running again in future ?

the goal of cheap fuel is to kill Isis. they can not simply get good money from their stolen fuel. if Isis is one day out of the picture, fuel price will go up.

you reckon ?

ok...............who thinks the industry will get back up and running again in future ?

Who has a crystal ball? Even a few weeks after the price fell off a cliff in 2014, oil futures were still at $100+, so the experts neither predicted the drop nor expected it to be anything other than a blip. Now, for every article that predicts an imminent recovery, there is another talking of seemingly endless gloom. Basically, nobody knows.

But simple economics suggests that it needs to recover at some point unless we discover a cheap alternative to oil. It is a matter of debate, however, as to what the industry will look like when the recovery comes. If you are in your 30s with experience and you can weather the storm, I think that you will be in a good position. Youngsters are no longer attracted to the industry and those with only a few years under their belts are looking ripe for cost savings; older workers are taking early retirement, being laid off or will see out their twighlight years hoping to escape the chop. But I think if you are in your 30s or early 40s, the revitalised industry will see you have far greater headroom with fewer bright young things snapping at your heels.

i remember reading an article , apparently the world has enough oil to last another 100 years without drilling for more.

i remember reading an article , apparently the world has enough oil to last another 100 years without drilling for more.

Clear oil enough for about 35 years, oil from the oil sands should be enough for another 110 years but, companies need to improve technologies for getting oil from oil sands.