Tight Labor Vexes Brazil’s Deep-Sea Oil Drilling

Technological advances will help oil giant Petrobras and its foreign partners tap huge subsalt reserves off Brazil’s coast, but a shortage of skilled workers and tight equipment supplies pose challenges.

High oil prices, previous under-investment in training by the energy industry, and increasingly hard-to-access reserves have driven up the cost of the complex equipment and skilled engineers needed for major oil projects.
“Perhaps our single greatest hurdle lies in the hiring and training of people,” said Mark Riding, the deep-water theme director for oil field services supplier Schlumberger Ltd, during a seminar at the biennial Rio Oil and Gas conference this week.

“Years of under-investment in talent have led to a limited and aging pool of skilled workers.”

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