Which is the best in terms of salary, bonuses, and allowances: Shell, Chevron, Eni, Total, Saudi Aramco, or British Petroleum?

Which is the best in terms of salary, bonuses, and allowances: Shell, Chevron, Eni, Total, Saudi Aramco, or British Petroleum?

Answer

Overall, best in terms of money are expat jobs at Saudi Aramco, followed by Shell, then BP, Chevron, and Total on par, and finally Eni.

In detail, it very much depends on job position, location, hiring company and to some extent nationality. Here are a few important points (at very high level with many exceptions):

Shell, Chevron, BP, and Total are all IOCs (international oil companies) with very diverse portfolios and international presence. For typical engineering/core business jobs (excluding R&D and support functions), salaries tend to be similar for a certain location. For example, a wells engineer at Qatar Total will make about the same as wells engineer at Shell Pearl GTL in Qatar in terms of salary and allowances. Exxon Mobil and Shell tend to pay 10–20% more in this category Saudi Aramco is an NOC mainly operating in Saudi Arabia (actually the largest national oil company by far) with less standardized pay scale compared to IOCs. How much you get paid at Aramco depends on location and nationality. Expat jobs in Saudi Arahia (mostly reserved for Western passports) pay 20–100% more than comparable ones at IOCs. Also, Saudi Arabia is a tax-free country which make these jobs even more attractive. These jobs also offer amazing benefits (e.g. compound housing and ticket home). Local jobs at Aramco (typically operational or in support functions) are less attractive and pay less than IOCs (partially due to the list cost of living in Saudi)Eni is an interesting company with both operator arm (comparable to IOCs) and an EPC arm (engineering, procurement and contracting similar to KBR and Jacobs). For the operator arm, benefits are typically 20–30% less than IOCs for similar positions and locations. The EPC side pay even much less (up to 50% lower)Hiring in a cyclic industry such as oil and gas is all about timing. Hence, all these companies tend to tighten their benefits a big 

during times like now with oil price around $50/bbl. Benefits can increase/decrease by 30–50% due to change in industry performance (depends also on which segment of industry: upstream tends to be hot badly by low oil price but not so for chemicals and downstream