“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 26

problem knew that employment in the sector would have been non-
existent without the boom. Most anything they saw, then, counted as
new employment.
In 2011, researchers at the respected consultancy IHS Global Insight
used those fundamentals to estimate how many people had got en jobs
because of the shale boom. 13 h ey looked at how many wells were
drilled and how many people were needed for each well. Put ing the
pieces together, they found that nearly 150,000 people were employed
in the industry in 2010. h ey estimated that the number could climb
to 250,000 by 2020 as production from shale gas rose.
But the economic consequences went further. In Youngstown, Ohio,
I met Becky Dearing, a co-owner of the Dearing Compressor & Pump
Company. Dearing was in her late forties with shoulder-length brown
hair. Her desk was lit ered with papers, including an application from
someone looking for a job; on the other side of the room, two big
maps of the area's shale deposits hung on the wall. h e company had
been around since 1945, which meant it had seen its share of booms
and busts. Coal came i rst, then steel, then the oil boom of the 1970s
followed by the 1980s bust. Now Dearing was riding the shale gas wave.
h e company supplied equipment that the drilling companies used to
produce gas and to move gas through the pipeline system to custom-
ers. Its clients had drilled some of the i rst test wells in Pennsylvania in
2008. Now a combination of good timing, luck, and a willingness to bet
on shale gas was paying of . While its neighbors were shut ering during
the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Dearing built an
entire new manufacturing plant on the back of shale-related demand.
“We went from 60 to 160 [people] in a year and a half,” said Dearing;
three years before that, they'd employed only 30.
h e IHS people i gured into their calculations the fact that people
were get ing jobs supplying the shale gas industry. It's called indirect
employment, and it includes everything from steel makers to drill-
site caterers to companies producing the chemicals that go down the
wells. h e analysts estimated that another 190,000 jobs of this sort had
been created by 2010 and that the number might rise to 370,000 by
2020. 14 h ey also included another category, called induced employ-
ment, which counts up all the jobs that are marginally related to the