Rebuilding the completion crew workforce at US shale plays will take time, likely to slow North American crude oil production. The net result of the industry’s massive layoffs may be steeped in irony: Now that oil prices are gaining some steam, the workers needed to get the stuff out of the ground are increasingly harder to come by. Between March and April, the number of drilled but uncompleted (DUC) wells increased in the U.S. by 187, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). That’s part of an increase of 529 DUCs since the beginning of the year, which makes the April 2017 number of DUCs the highest since April 2014 – five months before the generally accepted ‘beginning’ of the downturn. Federal numbers show that the number of DUCs increased as oil prices decreased: April 2017 – 5,721 April 2016 – 5,452 April 2015 – 5,303 April 2014 […]