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NPR: In Pa. gas industry jobs boom despite nationwide oil and gas bust

A worker checks paperwork on the monkey board of a Cabot Oil & Gas drill rig in Kingsley, Pa.

Lindsay Lazarski/WHYY

A worker checks paperwork on the monkey board of a Cabot Oil & Gas drill rig in Kingsley, Pa.

Oil and gas workers are facing unemployment in the country’s big oil producing states like Texas. But NPR’s energy reporter Jeff Brady took a trip to a shale gas training center in Williamsport and finds students optimistic about their future job prospects. The governor’s chief of staff, KatieĀ McGinty, tells Brady that Pennsylvanians should be seeing less and less Texans on drill rigs. Listen to the NPR story here.

“Pennsylvania has gone from pretty much nowhere on the map in terms of natural gas production to now second in the country behind only Texas,” says McGinty.

When drilling rigs started showing up, McGinty says residents worried the good jobs would go to out-of-state workers, leaving locals with nothing but the environmental consequences of drilling.

“In the early days, those concerns were exacerbated by too many people seeing nothing but Texas and Oklahoma license plates,” says McGinty. That’s changing, she says, as more locals learn the skills necessary to work in the gas business.

The latest figures show more thanĀ 31,000 people in the stateĀ have jobs related to extracting natural gas. That’s nearly double what it was five years ago. State officials say the rate of employment growth in the gas fields has slowed recently, but for now it’s still growing.

Methods of calculating Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale jobs have always been controversial. The 31,000 figure includes workers in these six sectors:

  • Crude petroleum and natural 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
  • Pipeline transportation of natural gas

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