With a decline in oil prices over the past few months, Baker Hughes officials announced plans in late January to cut 7,000 jobs worldwide.
With a steep decline in oil prices over the past few months, Baker Hughes officials announced plans in late January to cut 7,000 jobs worldwide.
Melanie Kania, media relations specialist for Baker Hughes, said it is too early to determine the direct effect on potential employee layoffs and future operations at the Tomball corporate campus and the nearby 100-acre Western Hemisphere Education Center.
"It's really too soon in the process," Kania said. "We don't have any location-specific information on how these layoffs will be distributed—they're a company-wide global number."
Oil field services company Halliburton acquired Baker Hughes for an estimated $34.6 billion in November. The acquisition comes after an almost 60 percent decline in oil prices since June, reaching a five-year low, according to Baker Hughes. The job cuts are expected to reduce the company's workforce of 62,000 total employees by about 11 percent.
Lawrence Chapman, manager of the Western Hemisphere Education Center, said he does not foresee major changes for the facility as a result of the company-wide layoffs. Kania said as of mid-January, the company was still determining details of potential staffing or service operations at the center.
"With oil prices being depressed, we're expecting to see a decrease in our training, but the decrease will match our slowdown on the operation side," Chapman said. "With that being said, learning is one of the Baker Hughes core values, so this facility will continue to be utilized to train and develop our workforce."
The center provides training for Baker Hughes employees from around the world in a classroom setting through hands-on mechanical and electrical labs, as well as field operations methods with on-site rigs and wells. The center features a 140,000 square-foot indoor training facility that spans across two buildings, along with a 162,000-square-foot training yard.
The center is part of the Baker Hughes Tomball campus, which local officials estimate will pump $8 million in revenue over the next decade into the local economy.
Since the $55.8 million education center's grand opening in May 2014, Chapman said the facility has averaged about 399 trainees a day, many from outside of the Tomball area.
Chapman said there are plans in place to expand the center in the future.
"We have facility expansion plans for the education center in general," Chapman said. "Whether of not we do that expansion in 2015, we haven't determined that yet."
He said that the education center is a valuable resource for Baker Hughes.
"The alignment of all product lines within the same training facility and the engineers coming through have a much better foundation [by using the center]," he said. "Knowledge about what we do as an organization as [our employees] progress through their careers at Baker Hughes makes them more valuable to the organization—a much bigger asset."
