What I am hearing from friends at XOM is that the are letting go of some serious geo talent. What a disgrace. I'm so glad I left before this bloodbath. My condolences to all those affected. Hopefully you can use this as an opportunity to move on from XOM and discover something new and exciting. Leaving was the best thing I ever did.
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Truth is that EM exploration has had a dismal record for a long time now. For several years before and after the merger in 1999, most of the "barrels" discovered by exploration came from the Development Company funding a new LNG train in Qatar every year or so, or some other Development Company funding of a project already well defined. Yes, exploration counted each and every one of those Qatar trains as a "discovery". Big joke. Finally Upstream broke discoveries into categories of "by the bit" and "other" so exploration couldn't take credit for discovering those fish in the barrel. Made JT so mad.
A well planned and executed acquisition strategy, or relying on partner discoveries, would have made much more financial sense than spending billions and billions on EM exploration. Run the numbers and they make XTO look like a good buy. Have someone list the true EM wildcat discoveries over the past 25 years and it will be obvious that EM exploration has not been anything close to a success.
So, how do you explain why our competitors have fewer geos by far (per engineer, per barrel) and they have much better success rate? Something is wrong...
pta+18d2eUrW WTH are you to think you know everything about geoscience? You are either ignorant or uninformed. Go Finish your safety PowerPoint. Everyone knows how busy it keeps you.
This is the result of having a CEO from the downstream who doesn’t understand the role of geos. Yes it’s true in mature fields you can run with mostly engineers, but exploration takes a lot of manpower from the basin modeling, seismic interpretation, high grading and well planning. The project I was on couldn’t afford to lose even one person without putting timelines and quality of work in jeopardy and multiple people were let go. As sad as I am, I feel bad for the survivors who will end up with unmanageable workloads.
Yes, XOM was way geo overstaffed. Way to go to lay them off. When I was with Chevron we had 1 geo and 4 reservoir engineers plus a production engineer, depending on the project development, etc. With XOM it is different way around 4-5 geos to 1 reservoir engineer, and then they always somehow hide it and send them to exploration company which is the worst explorer in the world. Have not discovered anything in two decades except Guyana that we all know came by luck.