Shell will be cutting 330 jobs from its North Sea operations, mostly office jobs based in Aberdeen, the supermajor said on Tuesday, as carried by the BBC.
The Aberdeen team of Shell will thus be reduced to around 1,000 people from the current 1,300 workforce. Most of the job cuts in Aberdeen will take place over the next two years. Other jobs will be affected by the planned project of decommissioning of the Brent Charlie platform, expected to be completed within two years, according to the BBC.
Shell continues to consider the UK North Sea as a core area of its operations, but the pandemic and the crash in demand, as well as the energy transition, have prompted major oil companies to review their operations and workforce numbers.
Shell, for example, said in September that it would slash its workforce by between 7,000 and 9,000 jobs as part of cost-cutting efforts, with the cuts to take place until the end of 2022. Some 1,500 of these have agreed to take voluntary redundancy deals. Shell had a workforce of about 83,000 people as of the end of 2019. This means that the new layoffs will constitute close to a tenth of the total as the company tackles the new challenges posed by the pandemic.
"To be more nimble, we have to remove a certain amount of organisational complexity. In addition, we have to make sure we are making the best of the core capabilities we need to succeed," Shell's chief executive Ben van Beurden said at the time.
Other oil giants have also announced significant workforce reductions after oil prices crashed in March last year. BP, another major player in the UK North Sea, is cutting 10,000 jobs globally, or around 15 percent of its workforce, most by the end of 2020 and mostly office-based jobs. Exxon is also reducing staffing levels by an estimated 14,000 jobs globally, including contractors, which is around 15 percent of workforce. As many as 1,900 of those job cuts will be in the United States, primarily at management offices in Houston, Texas.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Charles is a writer for Oilprice.com More