Conventional oil and gas production: Resources and labour

Steel, injected water and the energy spent getting energy

What this tab covers The natural resources (land, water, materials, fuel or feedstock) and the labour needed to capture this energy, per unit, with the reason each is needed.

Oil and gas production needs steel, cement and drilling fluids for wells, water or gas to maintain reservoir pressure, fuel for compressors and pumps, and a skilled workforce of drillers, engineers and offshore crews.

Natural resources

Resource	How much	Why it is needed
Steel and cement	Not quantified per barrel in our sources⁶	Each well is lined with nested steel casing cemented in place to stop oil, gas and brine leaking into aquifers; platforms are large steel or concrete structures
Injection water and gas	Raises recovery from at most about 20% (primary) to typically 35-45% of oil in place¹	Replacing the volume of oil removed keeps reservoir pressure up so oil keeps flowing to the wells
Energy for operations	About 15.5% of the gross energy output of oil liquids is consumed in producing them⁵	Pumps, compressors, water handling, gas processing and transport all run on fuel or electricity, often gas from the field itself
Ocean space	Offshore supplies nearly a third of oil and gas output⁶	Many large reservoirs lie under continental shelves and deep basins, requiring seabed and sea-surface installations

Labour

Phase	How much	Skills	Why it is needed
Exploration and drilling	Not quantified per unit output in our sources¹³	Geologists, geophysicists, drillers, directional drilling and mud engineers	Finding reservoirs and drilling kilometres of hole safely needs specialised skills
Operation	Alberta's whole upstream energy sector, including oil sands, employed about 138,000 people (2022)¹⁴	Production operators, reservoir and facilities engineers, maintenance technicians, offshore crews	Wells, separators, compressors and injection systems need constant monitoring
Operating cost per barrel	US firms need about USD 41 per barrel on average to cover operating costs of existing wells (2025)¹³	Field services, water handling, lifting	Labour and services make up much of the running cost of mature fields
Decommissioning	Not quantified in our sources⁶	Plugging and abandonment crews, divers, heavy-lift specialists	Wells must be permanently sealed and offshore structures removed at end of life

Sources

Increasing Hydrocarbon Recovery Factors (Zitha, Felder, Zornes, Brown and Mohanty) Society of Petroleum Engineers, 2011
Peak oil and the low-carbon energy transition: A net-energy perspective (Delannoy et al., Applied Energy 304) Elsevier (via RePEc IDEAS), 2021
Third World Ocean Assessment, Chapter 3, Subchapter 3b: Offshore hydrocarbons United Nations, 2025
Dallas Fed Energy Survey, First Quarter 2025 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 2025
Oil sands facts and statistics Government of Alberta, 2024