MONEY

Schlumberger announces layoffs of 11,000 employees

Ken Stickney

Oilfield services giant Schlumberger announced Thursday it would lay off 11,000 employees.

That’s in addition to the 9,000 layoffs it announced in January.

The oil services giant operates at dozens of locations around Louisiana, including Abbeville, Berwick, Broussard, Lafayette, Maurice, New Iberia, Scott and Youngsville.

Citing a downturn in exploration and production jobs, principally on U.S. land rigs, Chairman and CEO Paal Kibsgaard said the company’s earnings were down 19 percent sequentially in the first quarter.

Kibsgaard was speaking at the company’s first-quarter earnings meeting.

The January layoffs were announced as Schlumberger recorded 25 percent increase in dividends to stockholders, which OilPro said would total more than $2 billion.

Schlumberger listed about 123,000 employees worldwide prior to the first layoffs.

Retired LSU economics professor Loren Scott has said that most Louisiana oil and gas jobs are offshore.

He said those jobs would not suffer the extent of layoffs that would be felt in states where most of the drilling is done on land.

For example, much of the oil exploration and production in Texas in recent years has been done on massive shale plays, such as those in the Permian Basin and at the Eagle Ford Shale.

Other states that depend upon drilling on land, which demands higher per barrel prices, include Colorado, Wyoming, North Dakota and Ohio.

In Louisiana, drilling is done on land on the Haynesville Shale in Northwestern Louisiana and Tuscaloosa Marine Shale in eastern Louisiana.

The company works in about 85 countries and has headquarters in Paris, Houston and The Hague.