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Superior Energy Services, a global oilfield services firm, has moved its corporate headquarters from New Orleans to Houston, a move the company says puts it closer to its oil and gas customer base.

Greg Rosenstein, vice president of investor relations, said no personnel were moved as a result of the headquarters change and the company does not plan to move employees in the future.

The move happened quietly in February on the heels of Superior’s $2.7 billion acquisition of Complete Production Services, a Houston-based oilfield services company.

Rosenstein said the headquarters shift was largely a branding move as the company gears more of its oilfield services to drilling on land rather than offshore.

“With our acquisition of Complete Production Services, we’re now more heavily concentrated in the U.S. land market than offshore and a lot of our customers are headquartered in Houston,” Rosenstein said.

Superior Energy joins more than a dozen publicly traded companies that have moved their headquarters out of New Orleans over the past decade, down from 25 in 2001 to 11 in 2011.

Regional leaders have long lamented the loss of New Orleans-based public companies and the influence they have in the national and international business community.

Regional economic development organization Greater New Orleans Inc. declined to comment on the Superior move. Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.

Superior Energy employs 500 in the New Orleans area and 1,050 in Houston. Complete Production Services had 120 employees based in Houston at the time of acquisition.

 

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In testimony to the House Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Energy and Natural Resources, API’s Group Director for Upstream and Industry Operations Erik Milito urged Congress and the administration to promote energy policies that would aid the nation’s economic recovery and help reduce its debt:

“Our nation can and should be producing here at home more of the oil and natural gas Americans need. At a time when the United States still must import half the oil it consumes, we should be adding to our supplies from our own ample domestic resources. This would strengthen our energy security and help put downward pressure on prices while also providing many thousands of new jobs for Americans and billions of dollars in additional revenue for our government.

“Policy leadership for creating and overseeing a more robust program of safe and responsible development has been absent. We continue to hear about an “all-of-the above” energy approach. An “all-of-the-above” approach makes sense, but all-of-the-above necessarily includes oil and natural gas. The administration’s projections show that oil and natural gas will supply most of the nation’s energy for decades to come. Yet while the administration claims to support an “all-of-the-above” approach, we continue to see proposals to increase taxes on the industry, decisions that reduce opportunities for leasing and resource development, processes that string out permitting, and continued regulatory uncertainty.”

API represents more than 500 oil and natural gas companies, leaders of a technology-driven industry that supplies most of America’s energy, supports 9.2 million U.S. jobs and 7.7 percent of the U.S. economy, delivers more than $86M a day in revenue to our government, and, since 2000, has invested more than $2T in U.S. capital projects to advance all forms of energy, including alternatives.

 

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By Richard Thompson

 

Tulane professor Eric Smith has some advice for college-bound high school seniors unsure about a career path.

 

“There’s a pretty short list of unemployed entry-level engineers” in the oil and gas industry, said Smith, an associate director of the Tulane Energy Institute. “And when they come out of school, there tends to be a bidding war for their services.”

 

Thirty years after the last employment spike in the oil and gas industry, the energy sector is preparing to replace much of that same crop of workers as they approach retirement age. And after decades of minimal hiring activity, the looming exits promise to create a gap in the sector’s skilled work force that some colleges and businesses are looking to fill.

 

Industry officials say hiring levels have ebbed and flowed since peaking in the early 1980s. In 1982, about 708,000 people in the United States worked in oil extraction, with an additional 176,000 in refining, according to statistics from the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Since then, those employment numbers haven’t been matched, hitting 438,000 in extraction and 90,000 in refining in 2009.

 

“They see this coming in the future, that they’re looking at a lot of people retiring over the next 10 years, but their hiring is not only driven by the work that they need now, this year or next year, but recognizing that they’ve got to start bringing people on board and training them to take the place of these more senior people once they do start to leave,” said Stephen Sears, chairman of the Craft and Hawkins Department of Petroleum Engineering at Louisiana State University.

 

Sears said he has seen “a more sustained hiring effort by the industry” at LSU and other schools in recent years.

 

Students graduating with a background in petroleum engineering are well-suited for jobs in the upstream oil industry, like drilling wells or extracting crude oil, he said. And in turn, as word of openings spread, Sears said enrollment in the program has climbed. When he started at the department, in 2005, about 200 students were part of the program; now, there are upward of 500. “We’re anticipating that it continues to grow,” Sears added.

 

For the most part, students graduate from the program with a bachelor’s degree in four to five years, he said. Fifty-four finished in May, and about 80 percent had jobs by graduation, with most earning about $85,000 a year to start.

 

“It’s kind of a good industry to be in right now,” Sears said, “and I think we’re continuing to produce graduates that the industry wants to hire, which is good for them and good for us.”

 

Key economic cog

 

A hub for the oil and gas industry, employment in the Gulf of Mexico in the oil and gas drilling fields is typically concentrated in a couple of Texas counties and Louisiana parishes, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2009, Lafayette Parish had 3.2 percent of the nation’s employment in the industry, accounting for 2,014 jobs and 1.8 percent of the parish’s private sector employment, statistics show.

 

For his part, Smith, the Tulane University professor, said he thinks engineering graduates generally seem more interested in the research component of the industry, instead of working on oil rigs or building production platforms.

 

“If you’re a chemical engineer coming out of school today, priorities would be researcher first, and way, way down the list, I want to run a refinery or I want to be out on a drilling rig supervising a mud crew, but you need all of those people to have a functioning economy,” he said.

 

That’s caused some companies to look elsewhere to fill open positions. “What we’ve seen is we tend to import a lot of engineering types from other countries” to work as drilling engineers in the field, Smith said. Generally speaking, students in the United States “don’t really want to go into engineering,” he added, “because it’s tough, and if they do go into it, they want to be more on the research side than the operations side.”

 

To help cope with the large number of skilled workers set to retire, some petroleum companies have welcomed many of them back from short breaks as consultants, almost as a stop-gap measure, Smith said, adding that he believes part of the problem lies in a perception of the industry. “The root of the problem is that the U.S. hasn’t made it very attractive for students to study engineering.”

 

Push for fresh blood

 

This spring, Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which regulates the offshore drilling industry, launched a recruitment drive for the government at a dozen universities, including Tulane and LSU, to help promote new environmental science-related openings. That came on the heels of a five-campus tour last fall that sought to recruit petroleum, structural and electrical engineers.

 

Since then, BOEMRE has received more than 2,300 applications, officials say. But Smith said while the jobs help give some flexibility to the market, the cash-strapped federal agency has offered starting salaries that “in some cases, are 50-percent off the mark.”

 

“If your top salary is $84,000 a year, and the worst salary offer somebody gets (in the private sector) is $95,000, it’s kind of hard to compete,” he said.

 

Meanwhile, oil and gas companies have taken steps to generate a buzz to steer students toward careers in engineering by touting the prospect of high starting wages, the availability of new technology, as well as “all the gee-whiz side of the industry,” Smith said.

 

As some in the industry are still reeling more than a year after BP’s Macondo well erupted, killing 11 rig workers and causing one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history, some industry observers believe that disaster could contribute to another labor shortage in a decade or more, if existing energy workers discourage future ones from coming into the business.

 

“They get laid off, and they tell their sons, ‘Whatever you do, don’t go to work in the oil industry, because it’s not secure,’” Smith said, “and that contributes to some of the outmigration, too.”

 

Preparing for the future

 

Shell Oil Co. has started reaching out to potential energy industry workers at an early age. In May, students at five local high schools and five state universities competed in a science, technology, engineering and math competition hosted and sponsored by the company and Great Minds in STEM, a nonprofit group that promotes careers in such industries.

 

“Every company is always kind of reviewing its work force and taking a look at the kind of status, in terms of demographics, and we’re not different in that sense,” said company spokesman Hasting Stewart.

 

That process helps Shell officials determine what the appropriate approach should be, whether it’s stepping up recruitment on college campuses or making a hard push for more experienced workers.

 

“It’s a well-known fact that in terms of the oil and gas industry, that a significant part of our population is eligible, or will be eligible, for retirement in the next five to 10 years,” he said. “That’s just kind of how it works. If you think about it, the industry, over kind of the development over the last 30 years, all too often those people are still here, but they’re going to be able to leave pretty soon.”

 

Thomas Malatesta, 30, received his MBA from Tulane in the spring, where he focused on financial and energy markets after spending five years as an engineer. Judging from his own experience, he said the recent job outlook seemed more competitive for a candidate with an advanced degree rather than someone seeking an entry-level position.

 

“The market is not in very good shape, especially for professionals,” said Malatesta, who recently landed a position with a financial analysis group in the city. “It’s in slightly better shape for a recent graduate.”

 

At least in part, Malatesta believes he knows why. “If they’re going to hire a professional, it’s going to be a much higher salary,” he said. “And if they feel like it doesn’t work out, it’s difficult to fire people.”

Original Article

Hardest part is separation from family

Original Article

PORT FOURCHON — Life on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico has come a long way since the black gold was discovered underwater here 60 years ago.

Living for weeks on a platform the size of two football fields some 50 miles from the mainland can be comfortable and cushy, with good pay, catered cafeterias serving steak and spicy Cajun, lounges with pool tables and even mini movie theaters. At other times, it’s a water world of hot metal, cramped sleeping quarters and skin-burning sun.

The hardest part is simply being away from family.

Karl Kleppinger Jr., an unflappable Desert Storm veteran who spent more than 10 years working on oil rigs, was a dedicated floorman who made about $75,000 a year working off the Louisiana coast on the Deepwater Horizon, which erupted into a giant fireball Tuesday night. He was among 11 workers presumed dead after Coast Guard officials suspended their search Friday, saying they believed the workers never made it off the state-of-the-art semi-submersible platform.

Kleppinger, 38, worked near the drilling, at the heart of the operation. He had been away from his family for about three weeks when he made his nightly call home just before the blast, but the long-distance banter was different this time, said his wife, Tracy.

“He couldn’t get home soon enough this time. I don’t know why,” she said. “I can’t explain, there was this feeling that things were bad. It was a string of ‘I love yous, I need you home.’ That basically was the final words to each other.”

The accident was one of the worst oil rig disasters in the Gulf in decades. Crews were trying to clean up the oil that spilled during the fire but had to halt activities Saturday because of choppy seas, strong winds and rain.

The tragedy brought even more attention to safety for an industry known for its dangers, whether it’s the helicopter ride to the platform or working on the rig itself.

“You could know how long someone had been in the oil industry by how many digits were missing,” said Windell Curole, a Lafourche Parish levee manager whose father raised the family with the sweat of long days on oil rigs. “Back then, it was wildcatting in the truest sense. Crews didn’t eat lunch they worked so hard.”

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There have been dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries over the last several years, convincing the U.S. Minerals Management Service, which oversees the industry, that new safety procedures aimed at preventing human error were needed. The new rules are still being developed.

Companies say they go to great lengths to make life on the Gulf comfortable and safe. And officials with Transocean Ltd., which owned the Deepwater and was under contract by oil giant BP, point to the other 115 crew members who safely made it off the platform as evidence.

Bud Danenberger, former offshore regulations chief at the Minerals Management Service, said safety training is ingrained in the industry.

“They have a very good safety record. That’s why this is disturbing. It reflects poorly on everybody,” Danenberger said.

About 35,000 people work in the Gulf each day, and most do it for the paycheck.

“I don’t think many people fall in love with it. It’s the good money,” said Kenneth Cox, a 31-year-old offshore worker from Trinidad who was at a truck stop in Port Fourchon during a stint on land this week.

The workers come from all over. They’re from Southern farm towns, northern industrial cities and foreign countries.

“We get guys from north Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and as far away as Detroit through here,” said Virgil Allen, who oversees “Mr. Charlie,” a retired drilling rig in Morgan City where companies train new workers for offshore work. The students sleep in bunks four to a room, eat meals on offshore schedules and are tested for drugs — experiences they’ll have to endure on the water.

Still, the strain of weeks from land and family takes a toll. On Tuesday night, when Kleppinger called his wife, they talked about how he would be ashore in the morning. The following day, he planned to buy a new washing machine to replace a broken one.

“‘Baby, I will be there in a couple of hours, I’ll be home,’” Tracy recalled the conversation. “He says, ‘How are things?’ I says, ‘Apart from my washer, which you’re getting me Wednesday, everything’s fine,’” she recalled.

Despite the repeated separation, Karl stuck with his job. He needed the money to help care for his son. Transocean treated him well, promoting the former Army Ranger, who was a quick study of the hand signals, tools and cables that go with offshore work.

He wore a company baseball cap with pride back home in Natchez, Miss., along the border with Louisiana. Once he even put his life at risk for the company, said Matthew Sudduth, a brother-in-law.

“Something went wrong on the rig he was on, it started listing extremely badly and started taking on water,” Sudduth said. “A hatch needed to be opened under the water line, and when they asked for volunteers, the only one to stick his hand up was Karl. Karl had no dive experience.”

He went under, opened the hatch and the rig with its 125 workers stayed afloat.

“He didn’t get stressed,” Sudduth said. “I’ve never seen the man panic. I never seen him highly upset. Nothing bothers him.”