Texas has gained 576,000 jobs in oil and gas boom, study says
Bernard Weinstein, associate director of SMU’s Maguire Energy Institute, talks about a study showing Texas has gained 576,000 jobs in the oil and gas boom.
By JIM LANDERS
The Dallas Morning News Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — Unconventional oil and natural gas production is creating “a tremendous economic boom for Texas,” with 576,000 new jobs created so far and nearly a million predicted by 2020, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the IHS CERA group, an energy consulting firm.
IHS vice president John Larson said the boom in Texas has also generated $22 billion in new government revenue this year, with about half going to the federal government in personal and corporate income taxes. The rest has gone to the state and local governments and the Texas Permanent University Fund.
IHS CERA’s estimate of the impact of oil and gas on the state’s job market is more expansive than similar work done by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The bank’s estimates show that since the 2008 recession, the oil business has added tens of thousands of jobs, while a more balanced economy has added hundreds of thousands of jobs in all directions. BLS, meanwhile, counts fewer than 60,000 Texas employees in specific oil and gas occupations.
Larson said the boom in oil and natural gas extraction creates both direct and indirect jobs that reach far out into the economy. . .
Bernard Weinstein, associate director of SMU’s Maguire Energy Institute, said the jobs analysis was “a quite reasonable estimate.”
“There’s no question that the shale boom has been a real tonic for the state’s economy,” Weinstein said. “The study confirms what I’ve seen in some of the research I’ve done. … It’s a good thing for the state of Texas, and it should continue unless policymakers in Washington screw things up” with costly regulations.
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