Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the country from the impacts of price spikes, but unless oil prices col-
lapsed, this protection would be far less than enthusiasts hope.
All of this high theory is unlikely to impress Jennifer Kaiser. Had
I met her in June 2011, she probably would not have known the i rst
thing about oil, but by the time we found ourselves chat ing outside her
Carrollton restaurant a year later, petroleum was a central part of her life.
h e town got swept up in tight oil fever the previous October, as landmen
and drillers moved in to extract crude from the Utica shale thousands
of feet beneath the ground. So many oil workers were in town that they
started begging her to open the restaurant at four o'clock in the morning,
before they headed of to the rigs. h e town was short of places to stay, so
Kaiser also took in two oil workers as boarders above her restaurant. Her
brother did even bet er: the previous autumn, he had leased his land to
an oil and gas company for more than a million dollars. For people from
Carrollton, Ohio, to Williston, North Dakota, booming oil production is
about something quite simple: jobs.
h ere's lit le question the oil industry employs a lot of people. But
the actual numbers mat er, particularly if you want to extrapolate them
to predict how many jobs a growing oil industry could create. h e
American Petroleum Institute claims that oil and gas together employ
nearly ten million Americans.
42
h at's too generous. It includes the peo-
ple who staf nearly two hundred thousand gas stations across America,
but it's fair to assume that increased U.S. oil production won't raise their
numbers too. It also includes all sorts of people who benei t from the
money spent by oil and gas workers. Many of them might get richer,
but, like Kaiser, many would still have had jobs without oil.
You'd do bet er to look at the number of people who are actually
engaged in producing oil. Government statistics don't distinguish
between jobs in oil and in gas, but together, they report 160,000 people
employed as of 2010.
43
It's also reasonable to assume that a similar num-
ber have jobs that government statistics classify as “support activities,”
raising the total to around 300,000. If you want to be particularly gen-
erous, you can even go a step further, guessing that for every job that's
technically in the oil industry there's another upstream, from producing
steel to line the wells, cooking food to cater the drill sites, or some other
associated activity. h
is takes us to somewhere in the neighborhood of
Search WWH ::
Custom Search