'I fault myself for not paying more attention,' Conoco CEO tells employees facing deep job cuts

Fri, Sep 5, 2025, 12:06 PM 4 min read

By Georgina McCartney and Arathy Somasekhar

HOUSTON (Reuters) -ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance told employees on Thursday that one of the reasons he had to cut up to 25% of the workforce was because the U.S. oil and gas producer had become less competitive as it focused on swallowing smaller rivals.

Lance was speaking to employees in a town hall meeting a day after he sent employees a video announcing the job cuts as part of a broad restructure focused on cost reductions.

Employees watching the hour-long meeting online and in person at the company's Houston headquarters on Thursday morning also learned later that day that layoffs would begin as early as November 10.

Lance said he had prioritized recent acquisitions over controlling costs.

"The cost and the whole competitiveness of the company probably took a backseat to those initiatives and those things we were doing for very real reasons, important reasons for the company," Lance said in a recording of the town hall heard by Reuters.

"I fault myself for not paying attention and keeping the other things sort of centered and important," added Lance, who has been in the top job for 12 years.

"I have to pay more attention to it," Lance said, referring to the sustainable structure and health of the company.

Conoco bought smaller peer Marathon Oil last year for $22.5 billion. In 2021, it bought Concho Resources for $9.7 billion, and also acquired Permian assets from oil major Shell for $9.5 billion. The energy industry has gone through the largest consolidation in a generation in the past two years.

"We probably backslid a little bit in the cost effort... maybe we should have been smarter about how we did it," Lance told employees in the town hall.

Though many expected job cuts after the company flagged the need to cut costs, the scope of the reduction surprised the industry, said Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston.

"It is like Lance took his hands off the steering wheel," said a Conoco source, who attended Thursday's town hall meeting.

The source, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak on the record, said that while they appreciated the honesty from Lance, they also felt he avoided answering certain questions.

"Lance was just dancing around the questions and not answering directly. Things did not feel any more transparent or clear after the town hall," the source added.

An employee asked how people would be laid off fairly and with dignity during Thursday's town hall. The atmosphere was one of disappointment and frustration, the source said.