Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that Pennsylvania has 500,000 fracking jobs, but reports indicate that the figure is closer to a tenth of that.
“There’s very few states that benefit like you do from fracking. I mean, you have 500,000 jobs,” Trump said in Erie, Pennsylvania, on September 29, according to The Washington Post.
“Kamala has said repeatedly, she wants to ban fracking, which would kill over 500,000 jobs in Pennsylvania alone,” he added in Latrobe on October 19.
Speaking at a town hall the following day in Lancaster, the ex-commander-in-chief said: “The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania produces 500,000 energy jobs. They’d be wiped out.”
That same day, October 20, Trump was doing a stint as a fry cook at a McDonald’s in Feasterville-Trevose, where he told the press: “She’s going to have no fracking. That’s going to cost Pennsylvania 500,000 jobs and the revenues untold.”
While Vice President Kamala Harris said she would ban fracking during her presidential run in 2019, she has since changed her position, casting the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to pass the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which increased fracking leases.
Short for “hydraulic fracturing,” fracking is a drilling technique utilizing high-pressure water and chemicals to get ahold of natural gas and oil underground. It’s estimated that 79 percent of US natural gas and 65 percent of crude oil is procured by fracking.
The Trump campaign argued that a report from 2022 commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute and a 2020 report by the Global Energy Institute, which is connected to the US Chamber of Commerce, both support Trump’s number, but The Post noted that these are groups with a vested interest.
The American Petroleum Institute found that 423,700 jobs could be found in the industry if “indirect” and “induced” jobs were included.
Indirect jobs are careers, such as those who supply the main factory operation. Induced jobs are industries created to allow direct and indirect employees to spend their money, for example, a waitress at a restaurant.
The group associated with the US Chamber of Commerce found that 609,000 jobs would be lost if a fracking ban was put in place. That figure was based on the estimated effect of higher energy costs and decreased government revenue. The number was so high that a report from the Trump Energy Department stated that it was not in line with the agency’s estimates.
While Trump has referred to “500,000 energy jobs,” the reports cited by the Trump campaign include jobs outside of the energy industry.
The petroleum group’s estimate of 423,700 jobs includes 93,060 direct jobs created, 143,530 indirect jobs created via the supply chain, as well as 187,110 induced jobs.
The group’s estimate also includes jobs at gas stations as being part of the “oil and gas industry,” with a Labor Department census finding that 41,000 people have such jobs in the Keystone State. That’s almost half of the direct jobs in oil and gas that the report outlines.
An official from the American Petroleum Institute said 33,000 gas station jobs were included in its direct number, according to The Post. They were included as the gas sold could have been obtained via fracking.
The Pennsylvania Department of Energy Program found in a report that there are about 20,994 natural gas jobs and 19,670 petroleum jobs in the state. In total, that would be around 41,000 jobs, or less than half of the jobs cited by the petroleum report.
A senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, Sean O’Leary, has calculated that only 18,636 jobs can be directly connected to fracking. With indirect jobs figures from the Economic Policy Institute, the total number would be about 55,000 jobs. That’s about a tenth of the number claimed by Trump.
“The bottom line is that, however you cut it, fracking is not a major driver of employment in Pennsylvania and Appalachia,” the researcher told The Post.
“We’re talking about 20,000 or so jobs in an economy of 6 million jobs. The Philadelphia Public Schools employ more people than the state’s entire fracking industry,” he added. “There are more hairdressers in Pennsylvania than there are fracking workers. The Amish population of Lancaster County is more than twice as large as the number of fracking workers statewide.”
