IF THERE’S ONE INDUSTRY whose prospects look solid when it comes to business travel, it’s the oil and gas sector. We’re consuming more than twice as much oil and gas as we did in 1973 and it accounts for more than half of our energy needs globally. Every day we use 142 million barrels of oil and gas combined, and it’s likely to rise further to 180 million by 2030. Our sheer hunger for oil and gas means that we will increasingly need more people to travel around the globe to search for it, dig for it or pump it out, and move it to market. “The industry is booming at the moment, energy is vital and the exploration market has picked up dramatically,” says Adam Knights, group sales director at ATPI. “It’s not
recession proof – look at the 1970s – but this time there is so much pent-up demand from emerging markets, such as China and India.” Rising fuel prices have made drilling
and exploration in extreme spots more attractive, from Sakhalin in Russia’s far east to the prolific deepwater Golden Triangle, consisting of Brazil, the Gulf of Mexico and West Africa, and this means extensive travel programmes for its engineers, geologists and crews. “Our business is now incredibly broad in its geographical nature,” explains Kevin Morrison, supply chain manager at Archer (UK), an oil company with 100 offices around the globe and activities in energy-rich Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Indonesia.
It’s not just developing markets that are active. Take shale gas in North America: the US alone has created more than 600,000 direct and indirect jobs in this sector. By 2015, that number is expected to exceed 850,000 – most of whom have to move to remote sites regularly for work, from North Dakota to southern Texas.
NORTH SEA OIL Domestically, the UK is also a big supplier of top talent that travels for this global industry, borne out of expertise in North Sea oil from its base in Aberdeen. This is one of the main reasons why the Granite City’s airport saw its busiest October for five years, up 11 per cent on 2011 –