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Originally Posted by I make oil
I'm traveling and typing on my phone so this will be short.
As the USA article said Major projects are planned over many years. But the major projects are only a small part of the industry. The biggest deep water platforms are completely automated. The crews that operate them are small. They don't utilize the services of many companies. They are important as far as total volume contributed to the oil produced but not as much as far as the number of people employed. Marginal players on mature properties do not contribute as much volume wise to the big picture but they employ 50x more people. Utilize more service companies and have higher lifting expenses. This is where the economy will be hurt. It's not about what is made its about spreading it around the industry.
The super majors are protected from lower prices the same way the OPEC producers are. They spread the losses over a bigger foot print. I'm all about free market and capitalism but neither of these things help the nation. That is what this is about not a few majors loosing some money.
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I think you may be surprised at how much is tied to the construction, development, FEED, etc... for these major long term projects. Yea, once online it's minimal, but 5-10 years of design, testing, development and implementation keeps countless people employed - hell, we stay busy just picking up crumbs from various sectors on ONE major project selling products to 5 different companies involved with 5 stages of the project (I.e. Olympus and Big Foot).
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