Good morning; here's what the Oilman has for you today:

• Texas Oil Jobs Market Keeps Booming

• Hard or Good Times for Oil Investors?

• Upcoming Oil & Gas Events

• Tweet of the Day

Texas Oil Jobs Market Keeps Booming

The oil industry in Texas added 6,800 new jobs in May, the Texas Petro Index showed this month.

That’s an unprecedented number of monthly job additions, Karr Ingham, the creator of the TPI, said.

A healthy industry or dominos waiting to fall?

The record new job additions in the Texas upstream sector coincided with a decline in drilling activity.

That’s quite puzzling, given that reduced drilling activity normally means reduced headcount.

But according to Ingham, a headcount reduction may still be in the cards.

“Employment is often the last domino to fall after prices have weakened and begun to take drilling measures down with them,” Ingham said.

That means job cuts are looming on the horizon.

At least, that’s what the normal logic of the industry suggests.

But the funny thing is that there doesn’t seem to be an explanation for the massive May new job count.

wSo, the industry is defying its own normal logic.

A true mystery... or not

Oil companies have been taking out fewer drilling permits since the start of the year.

Rig count is down both for oil and gas.

But oil and gas production is running at record highs.

Maybe that’s why employment is so strongly up—to keep output going?

Or maybe oil producers are stepping up exploration on the quiet?

What with all those declining well productivity rates the WSJ wrote about recently.

There is no ready explanation, but that’s no reason not to like the news.

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Hard Times for Oil Investors

The oil industry is deeply split on its long-term outlook for oil demand.

Some, like OPEC and U.S. majors, expect business as usual to continue, while the European majors are preparing for a low-demand future.

Investors are stuck between these two scenarios.

The million-dollar question

It’s actually more like a multibillion-dollar question and it comes down to how successful the transition push away from oil will be.

If you ask OPEC, the transition won’t be very successful.

See the following hard evidence:

OPEC expects oil demand in 2050 to be higher than today’s demand, somewhere around 110 million bpd.

But if you ask BP, it will tell you it’s trying to prepare for another eventuality.

That eventuality—according to BP—is a drop in oil demand by between 25% and 60% by 2050.

U.S. majors are closer to the OPEC forecast camp than the BP school of thought.

Seriously, if anyone’s betting on long-term investment in oil, they sure are brave legends.

A reality check

A recent report showed that despite the transition push oil consumption last year remained unchanged.

That’s despite record wind and solar additions and rising EV sales.

So, reality seems to be on OPEC’s side and on Exxon’s side.

Not on BP’s.

Exxon said recently, the transition has no chance of success because it would lower living standards.

That’s something the net-zero advocates don’t talk about, but it’s enough to look at an emissions map.

The poorest parts of the world are the lowest emitters.

It’s hard to argue with facts, not to mention useless—you can’t argue, but you can’t change them.

Perhaps a good advice for investors would be to trust the facts, not the forecasts, regardless of where they come from.

Upcoming Oil & Gas Events

• June 28-29: Kentucky Oil and Gas Association 86th Annual Meeting

• July 19-20: 2023 Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico Annual Meeting

• July 20: Bakken Classic Fishing Derby

Around the Global Patch

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