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FUEL PRICE IMPACT

Oil workers strike gold as crude price soars

AFP, Madrid
These are booming times for the oil industry and the sector's workers are reaping the benefits as a lack of qualified labour has led to soaring wages, experts say.
In last week's World Petroleum Congress in Madrid, recruiting and retaining personnel emerged as a leading concern for oil company chiefs as they search for geologists, engineers and project managers in a limited pool of talent.
"All the salaries have been rising across the board," Fredrik Rengers, chief executive of specialist oil and gas recruitment company WorldWidcWorker, told AFP during the congress.
"For certain skills, you see the same spikey behaviour of salaries as for oil prices. For someone like a consultant engineer, one day he's on 1,000 dollars a day, and the next day he's on 1,800 dollars. "
One delegate said she had heard of graduate petroleum engineers being recruited on annual salaries of 100,000 US dollars straight out of university.
Labour is just one bottleneck in the industry -- others include shortages of drilling rigs or refinery parts - as it seeks to expand rapidly to find new sources of oil needed to satisfy the world's rising thirst.
“Every oil company, every oil services company, every company related to the industry is aware of the problem," says Michael Krenek, an energy industry specialist for consultancy Deloitte.
It's hard to get qualified people and it's almost across the board."
This has serious consequences for consumers, with high oil prices being partly driven by fears that supply will
struggle to keep up with demand in the future and new oil projects being delayed by bottlenecks.
A lack of personnel and job hopping by employees as they seek higher salaries is disruptive and undermines the ability of oil compa nies to innovate and find new sources of crude, says Marcela Donadio, an energy analyst from consultancy Ernst & Young.
She says the biggest shortages are for engineers and geologists, but demand extends to finance and accounting workers with experience of the energy industry.
"The salary of a petroleum engineer has doubled in the past three years," she says.
"I'm seeing people jumping from one place to the next (to boost their salaries) because there is an absolute shortage of people with specific knowledge of the oil and gas industry, " she said.
Stock options, flexible working conditions and bonuses are increasingly common for coveted staff. Benefits once reserved for top managers are being extended down the foodchain.
The current skills shortage can be traced back to the recession in the oil business in the 1980s when prices crashed and investment went into reverse, Donadio says.
"There was a ten-year gap when we didn't have people going into the industry in a significant degree," she says.
Furthermore, many "babyboomer" specialists born in the post-War years are thinking about retirement, meaning companies face an imminent exodus of their most experienced employees at a time when they are struggling to recruit.
One consequence of the fierce competition for brainpower is that oil companies are now looking further afield for their personnel, with the major Western firms widening their nets to include emerging countries and Asia.
"Traditionally, with the big major companies there was a lot of Western know how, but you now see a lot of managers and engineers from Asia in senior international positions," says Rengers. "And a lot of graduates are being hired from emerging countries." Oil companies are also more inclined than ever to take on unspecialised engineers -- civil engineers, for example - and train them for the petroleum industry. Some have even taken on maths graduates.
Despite the rising wealth, there is a distinct lack of triumphalism in the sector which has seen boom turn to bust on numerous occasions in the past.
As public protests against rising fuel prices gather pace around the world, the energy crisis is adding to the already bad image of the industry, which is seen as dirty, corrupt and a source of pollution and oil spills by critics.
"We re doing great but we don't feel good about it," concludes Krenek
"If you listen to the press in the US and the presidential candidates the oil companies are bad'," hesays.
"Even if you were happy, you wouldn't want to be seen to be celebrating.”