The oil company BP is expected to announce 300 job losses following a review of its North Sea operations.
It is believed that most of the cuts will be onshore. The company expects a relatively small number of compulsory redundancies.
Staff at BP's North Sea headquarters in Aberdeen will be briefed about the plans later.
BP currently employs 3,500 people in the North Sea, with a further 11,000 elsewhere in the UK.
The oil giant announced a major restructuring in December in response to the fall in the world oil price, which has halved in recent months.
It is also expected that, in line with other companies, BP will reduce pay for contractors.
Last month, BP announced that plans to cut hundreds of jobs within its back-office departments - many of them based in the UK and US - would be accelerated. The restructuring is expected to cost £640m in the coming years.
Speeding up Continue reading the main storyBP, which has been downsizing since the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, said it had long planned the cuts, but was speeding up the process due to falling oil prices.
At the time, a BP spokesman said: "The fall in oil prices has added to the importance of making the organisation more efficient and the right size for the smaller portfolio we now have."
The price of a barrel of oil dropped to a low of about $46 earlier this week from a peak of about $115 last summer.
However, the price had risen to $49.81 by Thursday morning.
BP will be the latest in a string of North Sea operators to announce job losses, with Shell cutting 250 jobs last August, and Chevron losing 225 in July.
Some, including the Wood Group and Chevron, have announced salary freezes for staff and pay cuts for contractors.
Even before oil prices started to fall, the industry had said it needed to address high costs, which included the number of contractors on large, often six-figure salaries.
UK Energy Secretary Ed Davey - who will meet industry leaders in Aberdeen later - acknowledged that tax issues may need to be examined.
Mr Davey told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that there must be no "panicked" response to short-term price fluctuations and insisted the government was "determined to do everything we can" to save jobs.
He added: "The oil and gas industry - in terms of corporate sectors - pays more tax than any other and therefore it's very important that we think about that both in terms of jobs and in terms of the overall tax take and the future health of the sector.
"We need to make sure that to secure our gas and oil needs in the decades ahead that we're planning with the sector on tax as well as regulation."
On Wednesday, the Scottish first minister said the falling price of oil posed a risk to jobs in the North Sea as she announced a task force was being set up to help the sector.
Nicola Sturgeon also made the offer of a funded guarantee to support apprenticeships in the industry.
BP and the North Sea- BP employs 3,500 staff in the North Sea out of a total of 15,000 across the UK and 84,000 across the world.
- To date it has invested £35bn in the North Sea, and produced five billion barrels of oil and gas.
- North Sea operations account for 5% of the company's global production.
- It has 45 production fields, 33 platforms and 10 pipeline systems in the UK continental shelf.
- BP estimates it is sitting on three billion barrels of oil equivalent reserves in the North Sea.
- The Clair field, west of Shetland, is BP's flagship future development and the largest oilfield in Europe, containing an estimated eight billion barrels of oil.
- The company also owns the Forties Pipeline System, described as the single most important piece of oil and gas infrastructure in the UK.
The Scottish government has called for the supplementary charge on the oil and gas industry introduced by the UK government in 2011 to be scrapped.
That position is backed by industry body Oil and Gas UK, which has argued that further tax cuts would help the sector deal with falling oil prices.
Scotland's energy minister, Fergus Ewing, told BBC Radio Scotland that the crisis in the North Sea posed the most serious threat to Scottish jobs in living memory.
Mr Ewing added: "I would call upon my colleagues in the UK government, with whom I hope I work in a constructive way, that we must all work together now, put the politics aside, don't re-run the referendum and let's get that tax deal implemented now because it will save jobs."
Mick Cash, general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, said BP's expected announcement was confirmation that "tens of thousands of jobs" were at stake in the industry.
He added: "If immediate action isn't taken then we risk turning today's crisis into longer term damage that would threaten the very core of our offshore industry. This is no time for playing politics when the security of UK energy supplies is on the line.
"Intervention is absolutely critical and that is the case that we are setting out today to the politicians north and south of the border and from all sides."
Data released on Thursday showed that the number of oil wells drilled in the UK sector of the North Sea fell to the lowest level in 15 years last year, which analysts said underlined the basin's struggle with high exploration costs that have contributed to a decline in output.
Oil and gas explorers drilled just 40 exploration and appraisal wells in the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) in 2014, 47% lower than the average yearly drills over the past 10 years, according to the data from Deloitte's Petroleum Services Group.
Many large oil companies have cut investments in the North Sea as they see more profitable new fields in emerging areas such as south-east Asia and Brazil.
North Sea oil producer Premier Oil said on Wednesday it was not committing to new exploration work beyond a portfolio of eight key projects, none of which is in Britain.
Also on Wednesday, Bank of England governor Mark Carney told a House of Commons committee on Wednesday that plunging oil prices represented a "negative shock" to the Scottish economy, which is heavily reliant on North Sea reserves.
But Mr Carney said he believed the fall - which has fed through to ultra-low inflation which it is hoped will boost consumer spending - was an overall positive development for the UK.
Energy analysts Wood Mackenzie have warned that if the oil price slipped below the $40 mark operators could consider closing down wells.
Wood Mackenzie told Scottish Energy News that with prices at $50 a barrel, oil production would cost more than its value in 17 countries, including both the UK and the US.
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