One of former President Donald Trump’s popular talking points during the 2020 presidential election was his claim that half a million Pennsylvanians were dependent on the natural gas fracking industry for employment. His statements, however, have been repeatedly challenged, with several research groups questioning the convolution of numbers. This article aims to deconstruct Trump’s dramatic assertion, standing firmly that Pennsylvania is home to 500,000 fracking jobs.
The natural gas industry, and fracking in particular, indeed plays a significant role in the Keystone State’s economy. However, the number of direct jobs in the industry, based on data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), significantly deviates from Trump’s claim. The BLS states that in 2019, there were around 26,000 jobs in the oil and gas extraction industry and its support activities in the state, a far cry from Trump’s cited half-million.
In his pronouncements, the former president seemed to be referring to a broader spectrum of indirect jobs – the jobs created along the supply chain or those engendered through the spendings of the indistry employees and companies. However, this approach to calculating jobs linked with an industry comes with complications. The fluctuations of counts could be essentially attributed to how wide a net can be cast to define what counts as an indirect job. This means, in theory, that any job in the state of Pennsylvania could be described as a fracking job if we take an extreme view of this categorization, hence, creating inflated figures.
Different evaluations have been postulated by multiple organizations. The American Petroleum Institute (API), a trade association representing the oil and natural gas industry, commissioned a study suggesting that the industry supported 322,600 jobs in Pennsylvania in 2015. However, when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce studied the potential adverse impacts of a fracking ban in 2020, they mentioned around 609,000 jobs in Pennsylvania could be at risk, both directly and indirectly.
On the other end of the scale, the Multi-State Shale Research Collaborative, in a 2015 report, estimated that direct shale-related employment made up less than 0.5% of total employment in Pennsylvania, directly challenging Trump’s assertion.
Gradually, we see a storyline that Trump’s statement of 500,000 fracking jobs in Pennsylvania was potentially a dramatization of a convoluted reality. In fact, it ties the narrative of intertwining politics, claims, and numbers, opening
