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OIL & G A S SPECIAL SEC TION
Viruses and Volatility Stabilizing oil prices and the ebbing pandemic are good news for the North Slope By Melissa Bannigan
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orth Slope workers fly in to work on a Boeing 737 owned by one of the borough’s largest oil producers and then spend two weeks working 12- to 16-hour shifts while living in camps alongside their coworkers. Or that used to be a standard operating procedure before the worldwide pandemic. So what happened in 2020 on the North Slope, where people live and work in close, communal environments and a novel coronavirus pandemic forced everyone to take a little more space? Alaska’s oil and gas industry is accustomed to the yo-yoing of economic cycles, but COVID-19 was a whole new issue to bounce back from. It caused companies to quickly reassess and implement new safety measures, such as mandating health check-ups for employees before they could travel to various locations from Fairbanks or Anchorage. And even despite taking new precautions, a worker at Prudhoe Bay tested positive for COVID-19 in March 2020, becoming the first person to get struck by the illness in the oilfields on the North Slope. After the worker at Prudhoe Bay tested positive for COVID-19, it was clear that North Slope operators needed to do more to protect critical workers. ConocoPhillips immediately paused flights of its rotation crew between Anchorage and the Kuparuk and Alpine
72 | May 2021
Oil and gas prices dramatically dropped in February: triggered by disagreements over oil production costs between Russia and Saudi Arabia, crude prices crashed 65 percent during the first quarter of 2020. This prompted an oil glut, forcing producers around the world to scale back production.
fields for two weeks. BP continued operating flights to Prudhoe Bay, which it operated at the time, but scaled back non-essential operations. The company also conducted pre-flight health screenings for all employees. Even as companies operating on the North Slope prioritized safety, economic realities meant they needed to focus not only on preventing their employees from contracting COVID-19 but on whether they could even continue employing all of their workers. Because while a positive test definitely wasn’t positive news for North Slope operators, it wasn’t their introduction so the problems the pandemic would offer. Oil and gas prices dramatically dropped in February: triggered by disagreements over oil production costs between Russia and Saudi Arabia, crude prices crashed 65 percent during the first quarter of 2020. This prompted an oil glut, forcing producers around the world to scale back production. Between the fluctuating price of oil and a need to protect workers, the North Slope tightened operations and reduced its workforce, and multiple rounds layoffs took place as oil operations adjusted. In February 2020, the total labor force on the North Slope was 3,900: a year later, it was down to 2,982.
Various Costs On April 7, the state’s biggest oil producer, ConocoPhillips, announced
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