Daily Times

The US oil industry has had a particularly tough time coping with the Covid-19 pandemic despite numerous federal relief measures to help ease the pain. Although the oil and gas industry received tax breaks, royalty relief, and forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Programme to keep employees during the pandemic, yet bankruptcies in the shale patch started to accelerate in the second quarter after oil prices crashed in early March because of the demand collapse and the Saudi-Russian price war. Thousands of jobs in the industry have been lost over the past six months, and a good portion of those jobs lost may never return. The US shale patch has been struggling this year and is bracing for more hardship with the incoming Administration of Joe Biden, who has vowed to ban new oil and gas drilling on federal lands and waters. According to a Houston Chronicle analysis from July, the Paycheck Protection Programme, with more than US$1 billion in forgivable loans to companies, helped save more than half of oilfield jobs in Texas. According to the analysis of figures from the Small Business Administration, companies in Texas were able to keep 93,117 jobs or more than half of the 182,500 people employed in the sector in Texas. Thousands of jobs have been lost since March in the US upstream and oilfield services sectors as the oil industry is becoming leaner in the aftermath of the pandemic.