Report: Shale Could Create 1 Million Jobs Over Coming Decade

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

December 15, 2011 | 12:50 PM

A new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers touts the economic impact of drilling in the Marcellus Shale and similar formations. From the Tribune-Review:

Developing the nation’s vast natural gas shale reserves could create 1 million manufacturing jobs by the year 2025 and save manufacturers $11.6 billion a year because of a low-priced and stable gas supply, according to a report released on Wednesday.
The amount of gas in the Marcellus shale reserves in Pennsylvania, New York and West Virginia, and about 25 other shale plays in the United States, estimated at 862 trillion cubic feet, is sufficient to be “absolutely a game-changer for the U.S. economy,” said Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, a D.C.-based trade group.
The annual savings that manufacturers could experience were determined by combining gas consumption levels with potentially lower gas prices if a large amount of shale gas is produced.
The job creation projected in the 16-page report, “Shale Gas: A Renaissance in U.S. Manufacturing,” is based on a high level of shale gas production. The jobs would be created by companies expanding or building new plants, as well as companies bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States, said Robert McCutcheon, U.S. industrial products leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC, which produced the report with the manufacturer’s association.