Here's why O&M woes are worse than you think in Singapore

Oil firms are already losing over $24bn market value.

More than $400 billion of proposed energy projects worldwide have been delayed since mid-2014 and pushed into 2017 and beyond, according to consulting firm Wood Mackenzie Ltd. In Singapore, the global center for oil-rig construction for decades, the slowdown contributed to the economy contracting the most in four years in the third quarter.

BP Plc abandoned oil exploration off the Great Australian Bight, it said last week, five years after beginning a search for resources in one of the world’s last frontier regions. BP had previously estimated the drilling program would cost more than A$1 billion ($768 million).

Decisions like this ripple through Singapore’s oil and gas services industry, from Keppel Corp. and Sembcorp Marine Ltd., the world’s biggest builders of oil rigs, to companies supplying anchors, chains and other components, to the eateries feeding an offshore engineering workforce that tripled over a decade to peak at more than 90,000.

More than two years of tumbling oil prices have wiped more than $24 billion from the market value of Keppel, Sembcorp and Singapore’s other listed oil-services companies -- or about two thirds of their pre-July 2014 capitalization. Since then, at least 25,000 jobs have been axed and one company, Swiber Holdings Ltd., has defaulted.

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