Natural gas-related employment in Pennsylvania has more than doubled in the last nine years, due to the development of the Marcellus Shale play, according to a report by the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry.
"Direct employment in gas development grew from 9,017 to 19,623 over the past nine years of the Marcellus boom," the quarterly Marcellus Shale Update reports.
The department began tracking the impact of Marcellus Shale gas development on the number of jobs in key industries in early 2015, although the employment impact of shale gas drilling in the play had begun making itself felt much earlier than that, James Martini, a Pennsylvania labor department economist, said in an interview on Wednesday.
"This was really started about 2008; employment really started to grow among those industries," he said. Job growth in the state "peaked probably sometime toward the end of 2014, the beginning of 2015," as a result of the price-related downturn in the oil and gas industry.
"It's just not as profitable to drill wells right now, due to the price," Martini said. "There's been a slowdown and a job loss in those industries in the last couple of years."
Data from the labor department, which tracks employment levels in the second quarter of each year, show employment in the state in six core industries rose to an estimated high point of 31,189 estimated jobs in the second quarter of 2012, then fell slightly to 29,839 in the same quarter of 2013 before rising again in the second quarter of 2014 to almost the exact same level as two years earlier.
Employment levels fell sharply in the succeeding two years, declining by more than one-third, from an estimated 28,929 jobs in the second quarter of 2015 to about 19,623 in the same quarter of this year.
The six core industries examined are: Crude and gas extraction, natural gas liquid extraction, drilling oil and gas wells, support activities for oil and gas operations, oil and gas pipeline and related structures construction, and pipeline transportation of gas.
The update also finds that "as of the second quarter of 2016, there were an estimated 52,531 people in Pennsylvania employed either in natural gas extraction development, by suppliers to the industry, or at companies that provide goods and services to the industry's employees."
Jobs indirectly attributed to Marcellus Shale development in the state include an estimated 6,284 jobs at suppliers and 9,839 jobs at companies that provide goods and services to the industry's employees, according to the update.
Martini said the data used to estimate the levels of Marcellus Shale-related employment is based on the state's quarterly census of employment and wages, which provides the baseline numbers for direct employment from the shale gas industry.
"That number is put into economic modeling software to generate the indirect, induced effects of those direct jobs," he said.
He cautioned that the data sets are not seasonally adjusted, which could obscure the true picture of Marcellus Shale employment trends in the state.
"There is going to be some movement that is not attributed to any type of economic change. It's just seasonal movement, like every industry has," Martini said.
