There was a lot of talk at the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) last year about the skills shortage being faced by the oil and gas industry. And that chorus echoed through the Offshore Europe show in September. In fact, it is a refrain the industry has been singing for the past few years.

Though everyone seems to be aware of the problem, few companies are investing in the many university students in UK universities seeking placements and dissertation/thesis topics related to the oil and gas industry. In fact, 2009 will go down as the year of lots of noise and very little action.

In March 2009, Ayman Asfari, CEO of Petrofac as principal speaker and guest of honor at the Scottish Oil Club Annual Dinner in Edinburgh, talked about the shortage of skills becoming available as a potentially negative impact on North Sea developments. In May at OTC, a panel of very senior executives from Shell, Total, ConocoPhillips, and Technip discussed issues with the management of large projects, agreeing that shortages in (project) engineering staff would lead to bottlenecks in execution capacity. At Offshore Europe, a headline in Upstream stated that players operating off the UK are struggling with an acute shortage of qualified personnel.

This point was underscored by Lee Tillman of ExxonMobil at a panel session titled, “The Next Trillion Barrels.” He identified the critical importance of having available the skills and capabilities bolstered by effective knowledge transfer (from the departing generation) to pursue the finding and production of these barrels. In response to a question from the floor, Tillman agreed there is a need for closer and better-structured industry/university partnerships to deal with the issue of capability development.

With this as a background, one would reasonably expect that in academic year 2008-2009 companies large and small — operator, service, contractor — would have been falling over themselves to work with universities and colleges to give students relevant industry experience and sponsor/enable degree- or diploma-related project work. In other words,one expects them to turn talk into action.

Unfortunately, this was not the case.

All of the universities in the UK engaged in oil- and gas-related degree programs reported greatly increased difficulties in securing meaningful projects or research/dissertation topics for delivery in 2009. With a number of honorable exceptions, the industry pulled in its horns by way of not coming through on promises made, leaving many students in an unnecessary state of panic and understandable disenchantment with the industry. The reasons cited were the hoary old chestnuts of being busy, staff cutbacks in such tough times, and a squeeze on discretionary expenditure.

In other words, the relatively trivial amounts of time and money required to execute such activity were regarded as an avoidable cost and not as a necessary investment.

In October 2007, I wrote a concluding, possibly prescient remark to an article I authored for the SPE 50th anniversary edition of the Journal of Petroleum Technology (JPT).

“Unfortunately, all too often over the past 30-plus years, the core skills required to find and produce hydrocarbons have been treated as a cost and not as an investment of strategic importance. It is my hope that the industry will not revert to past poor practice, thereby disenabling the drive to replace reserves and build production, disenchanting a generation of petroleum engineers and geoscientists, and making the job of selling the industry as a career in schools and universities even more of a challenge.”

In my time working as a petroleum engineer for Shell in Oman and Brunei, there was always the obligation to take on significant numbers of nationals studying at university for summer industry experience or to work on degree-related projects. The experience was rewarding both for the trainees and for the Shell staff charged with mentoring, guiding, and supervising them. Of course, there was no choice — this was an obligation, but one taken up gladly, not only with the students, but also with the relevant universities around the world in the structured approach endorsed by Lee Tillman.

Industry participants busy offshore the UK do have a choice, but it should be one guided by self interest — the interest expressed by the words I heard and read in the course of 2009. As we move through the academic year 2009-2010, I urge all of the players operating and working in the North Sea to support the Energy Talent Development initiative taken by ITF (Industry Technology Facilitator) supported by SPE, the UK Institute of Energy, and Scottish Enterprise.

Details can be found on www.oil-itf.com/index/energy-talent-development. I look forward to sharing much more positive news on this topic with readers of E&P in a year’s time.

Iain Percival can be contacted at iainpercival@fastmail.fm