Emma McConville was thrilled when she landed a job as a geologist at Exxon Mobil in 2017. She was assigned to work on one of the company’s most exciting and lucrative projects, a giant oil field off the coast of Guyana.
But after oil prices collapsed during the pandemic, she was fired on a video call in late 2020. “I probably passed out halfway through,” McConville recalled.
His shock was short-lived. Just four months later, she landed a job at Fervo, a startup in Houston that aims to harness geothermal energy below the Earth’s surface. Today he manages the design of two Fervo projects in Nevada and Utah, and earns more than Exxon.
“Covid allowed me to pivot,” he said. “Covid was a boost for renewables, not just for me but for many of my colleagues.”
Oil and gas companies laid off some 160,000 workers in 2020, kept budgets tight and hired cautiously over the past two years. But many renewable companies expanded rapidly after the initial shock of the pandemic wore off, attracting geologists, engineers and other workers from the likes of Exxon and Chevron. Half of Fervo’s 38 employees come from fossil fuel companies, including BP, Hess and Chesapeake Energy.
Executives and workers at energy centers in Houston, Dallas and elsewhere say a steady stream of people is shifting from fossil fuel jobs to renewable energy jobs. It’s hard to track such moves in employment statistics, but the overall numbers suggest such career changes are becoming more common. Oil, gas and coal employment has not recovered to its pre-pandemic levels. But the number of jobs in renewable energy, including solar, wind, geothermal and battery power businesses, is increasing.
The oil and gas industry had about 700,000 fewer workers last year than it did six years earlier, a decline of more than 20 percent. Much of that decline had to do with the slowdown in the shale drilling boom and increased automation. By comparison, wind energy employment grew by almost 20% between 2016 and 2021, to more than 113,000 workers.
In more than a dozen interviews, energy workers and executives said they had switched to renewable energy because they felt the best days of the oil and gas industry were behind them. Others said they were no longer willing to tolerate the extreme swings in oil and gas prices, and the accompanying cycle of rapid hiring followed by crushing layoffs. Many said concerns about climate change, which is mainly caused by the burning of fossil fuels, were a factor in their decision.
Jean Paul Beebe negotiated land leases for oil and gas companies before he was laid off early in the pandemic. He now works for Enel North America, a developer of renewable projects that is owned by an Italian energy company. He made a good living when shale drilling was booming, he said, but recessions caught up with him.
“Riding that wave is a drag, mentally,” Beebe said. “What I know now about renewables is absolutely more stable.”
Many workers, including electricians, offshore construction engineers, information technology specialists and environmental surveyors, say the skills they honed in their oil and gas jobs have translated well into the work they’re doing now.
“The bases are the same,” Miguel Febres, a petroleum engineer who worked in the oil industry for 19 years and is now a planner for wind and solar projects at Enel. “We install foundations, we install turbines, we build roads, we lay cables.”
The Greater Houston Partnership, which advocates for business interests in a city that is home to many large oil and gas companies, has been trying to attract more renewable companies to the region. A recent study for the group by McKinsey & Company found that 125,000 exploration, production and pipeline jobs were lost in the Houston area between 2014 and 2020, a reduction of 26 percent. The study warned that many more traditional energy jobs could be lost in the next three decades.
“The workforce of the future will look very different than it does today,” said Jane Stricker, senior vice president for energy transition at the Greater Houston organization and a former BP executive. She noted that dozens of new businesses had opened or moved to Houston since 2020, some with as many as 50 employees.
“Covid created a lot of opportunities,” he said. “No one was investing in oil and gas because the returns were terrible. There was a lot of money looking for a new opportunity”.
Executives at renewable companies say being in Houston has helped them attract workers.
“Every time we post a job like a geologist, drilling engineer or geophysicist,” said Tim Latimer, chief executive of Fervo, the geothermal company, “you name the oil company and we have a handful of applicants from each.”
Oil and gas executives say there are many good years of employment in their industry still to come and that it continues to fulfill a vital mission.
Scott Sheffield, CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources, a major Texas oil and gas producer, said “the understanding that we have provided energy security for the country and our foreign partners along with a stable and cheap source of energy for our citizens” keep going. make the industry professionally desirable.
Trent Latshaw, chief executive of Latshaw Drilling, which operates rigs in Oklahoma and Texas, said the disappearance of oil and gas jobs was greatly exaggerated. “A lot of people have been brainwashed that oil and gas is about to disappear,” he said. “The oil industry vastly outperforms renewables and will do so for a long time.”
But even Mr. Latshaw recognized that renewables were growing in importance.
Sunnova Energy, a leading Houston-based solar and battery provider, has expanded its staff from 350 in March 2020 to 1,400. It doubled its office space in Houston last year. Its information technology staff alone has grown to around 200 from about 70 in the last two years.
“There are a lot of people who come from oil and gas and say, ‘Hey, I’m ready for a change,’” said Anthony Cervantes, who interviews candidates in his role as chief information technology officer.
Mr. Cervantes was a consultant to oil companies before joining Sunnova two years ago, after he was laid off during the Covid slowdown, he said. He is now happier with his work, he said, because he is concerned about climate change: “It is good to have a purpose in your work.”
Some lawmakers in Washington and union officials have said the transition to green energy could hurt workers because jobs in oil, gas and coal tend to pay better and are more likely to be unionized than jobs at solar and wind companies. But renewable energy executives argue that those comparisons are incomplete and don’t take into account the more stable employment their industry provides.
John Berger, chief executive of Sunnova, said wages at his company had risen rapidly. “The pay rates we pay our service technicians have gone up a lot in the last 12 to 18 months,” he said. “So the pay gap, if there ever was one, has closed or is closing.”
Some workers who have left oil and gas companies said they were frustrated with how slowly their previous employers embraced clean energy.
Sam Johnson, 30, has been interested in renewable energy since high school. After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin with a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, he landed a job at Shell researching how the oil company could build large-scale renewable energy projects and sell electricity.
He said he initially expected oil companies to change the way they did business. “Most oil companies see that there will be a day when the demand for oil and gas will be lower and we have to be able to do something after that,” he said.
But he gradually came to the conclusion that the industry was putting only a small part of its revenue into clean energy research. A few months after joining Shell, Covid hit, oil prices plummeted, and research funds began to dry up. Working from home, he became more isolated as one colleague after another quit, often to work at renewable energy companies.
Most frustrating was the business perspective with which Shell executives viewed their projects. “Every project has to have a really high rate of return,” he said. “But electricity is not as valuable a commodity as oil or gas.”
A Shell spokesman, Curtis Smith, said the company “remains committed to investing in and supplying energy that is increasingly low carbon.” He added: “The levers we use to achieve that will continue to be examined with the goal of increasing shareholder value while contributing to a balanced energy transition.”
As the months passed, Johnson’s frustration grew. He saw the writing on the wall when his supervisor left Shell for a start-up, he said.
Shortly thereafter, that manager offered Mr. Johnson a job as a senior service architect for GreenStruxure, which advises companies on eliminating their greenhouse gas emissions. He now develops models to show how companies can save money by installing solar panels and batteries.
Mr Johnson still cherishes his time at Shell, saying he gained “a lot of experience” and liked the people he met there. “He would probably be willing to go back to Shell,” he said, “but he would have to be convinced that he could make an impact.”
