Hydraulic fracturing and the natural gas that it helps to procure gets a bad rap in lots of circles in the United States and abroad. The process of sending sand to create fissures in shale rock involves lots of chemicals, huge amounts of labor, and extremely expensive equipment. It’s a tough and imperfect industry, but it is one of the last places where the American Dream can be a reality.
People have been decrying the loss of manufacturing and skilled labor jobs that once allowed the children of working class parents upward mobility. Children go to school, and are told if they work hard and care enough, they can succeed. Underpaid and overworked middle school and high school teachers around the United States preach that anything is possible. Upward mobility in the workforce is what separates the United States from the rest of the world, right? It is what makes the United States great, there is no caste system, rags to riches stories of our forefathers give people great pride. The problem is though – with the world of telecommunications spreading, and allowing people with education to work anywhere and still report to their office, those who grow up in Small Town, USA and do not have the means to leave, end up stuck. The poors will stay poor, and the rich will stay rich.
The Equality of Opportunity Project did a study that takes the set of children whose parents are in the bottom 20% of the national income distribution, and calculates the fraction of this group who reach the top 20% of the national income distribution throughout the United States. Basically, they’re able to measure what it takes to have a believable rags-to-doing pretty damn well for yourself tale. There is something that’s really interesting about many of the cities that are in the 20+% possibility range. They have been oil and natural gas hotbeds for the past decade. The most upwardly mobile areas are the ones that have taken the most advantage of hydraulic fracturing and oil well drilling.
Since 2006, the United States private sector job opportunities have fallen and risen pretty dramatically. In fact, we are at almost the exact same point today that we were seven years ago according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you look at only the Oil and Gas Extraction sector, in the same time period, employment has gone up around 40%. 40% job growth in seven years! That’s insane.
Then we can look at salaries. Operators of fracking equipment can easily make between $60,000 and $100,000 a year depending on the area of the country. To be an operator, the only education requirement is to have a high school equivalency and the ability to obtain a commercial driver’s license. The average salary for a petroleum engineer (which does not necessarily require even a bachelor’s degree if the field experience is there) is $161,000. Local governments also get in on the action. The Equality of Opportunity Project found a mild correlation between areas with high upward mobility and those with the most progressive tax structure. That is, when lower income folks get more tax credits and the wealthy are taxed more, the chances of climbing the income ladder go up.
This phenomenon extends to the energy fields as well, but with a twist: Rather than taxing the rich, the states tax energy production. Wyoming has long had a robust mineral severance tax, netting the state some $1 billion per year, or about $2,000 for every resident, and North Dakota is closing in on the $2 billion per year mark. These figures don’t include impact fees and property taxes on the energy industry, which can amount to millions for local government. They can also encourage upward mobility: Wyoming spends more per pupil on public education than almost any state in the nation, and its teachers are paid well, too. Add to that the grants and scholarships energy companies often give to classrooms and students — along with big funding to energy wings of colleges and universities — and the educational system in the oil patch tends to be pretty strong.
This leads us to see that there really is a chance for one industry to allow people to grow up and move beyond the means of their parents. It is by no means a certainty, and it takes the ability to work very long hours and live in some rough places, but the opportunities are still out there, if you can make your way down to Vernal, UT or Broussard, LA. If you can afford to move up to Wyoming or North Dakota, the jobs can be found, especially if you’re young and willing to take some shit for a few years.
DISCLAIMER: I have worked in manufacturing for oil and natural gas for the past three years and have accepted employment for an oilfield services company. Some data has come from experience and being unable to find it directly from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
