Just how many oil and gas workers are there? Also, how LMOGA lies to Louisianans

12 May 2025

Something I like to keep pace of is the size of Louisiana’s oil and gas workforce. This workforce used to be a more sizable chunk of Louisiana’s overall workforce, but in recent years, the number has collapsed. The number of workers employed in drilling peaked in 2008 at almost 11,000 workers, and has fallen over the years to about a fifth of what it was, at just under 2,000 workers as of March 2025. Oil and gas extraction as a whole in Louisiana only employs about 5,300 people as of March 2025, down from its 2012 peak of 9,500 (which coincided with the start of the fracking boom).

Workers on oil and gas rigs, back in my youth, were frequently appealed to by conservatives who claimed to be protecting them from environmental regulations that would supposedly cause job losses. The state has had a history over my lifetime of treating fossil fuel capitalists with velvet gloves, even when catastrophic harm has been done to other industries, such as fishing, tourism and farming, by pollution from the oil and gas industry. Bobby Jindal, following BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill, which decimated tourism and fishing in the state, helped block lawsuits against BP aiming to recoup damages caused by the spill. Don Briggs, then president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, praised Jindal’s lawsuit ban as a “huge victory for the oil and gas industry.”

The political importance of the oil and gas workers has not declined with the number of oil and gas jobs. We can still find conservative appeals to these workers despite the fact that they make up a mere tenth of a percent of the workforce in the state (whereas they used to make up five tenths of a percent at their peak magnitude). For example, Grand Isle’s Martha Charmaine Griffin penned a letter to the editor of nola.com stating “Louisiana’s economy depends on oil and gas”, and citing a number of jobs that “the industry supported” of “nearly 250,000”. She argues that “burdensome regulations” and “political rhetoric” (whose, might I ask?) will be “pushing this vital industry away”. She states that Louisiana should pursue “policies that encourage, not punish, investment”, as if the profits from the exploitation of our state’s finite mineral dowry and underpaid workforce weren’t encouraging enough to the capitalists who undertake these projects, and they need policies that flatter them to really make it worth their while.

The number 250,000 was pulled out of thin air by Ms. Griffin. However, a couple weeks before Ms. Griffin penned her letter to the editor, Louisiana’s fossil fuel trade association, the “Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil & Gas Association”, delivered an “economic impact study” of a sorts which provided an even larger number, finding 306,750 “energy jobs” supported by the sector. These researchers, who are on the fossil fuel industry’s payroll, invent these numbers by massively inflating the actual number of people employed by the fossil fuel industry in the state. In the LMOGA report, for example, it is argued that oil and gas extraction in Louisiana employs 28,394 people, which is almost 6 times as many as are actually employed in that sector, about 5,300 as of March 2025. Note that both of these readings are taken from the same source, the BLS’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. It’s not clear to me how LMOGA arrived at their tally, as their methodology is rather opaque.

The researchers claim to use a RIMS model to estimate the total employment level and contributions to state GDP. The RIMS-II user guide published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis provides caution for interpretation of results from these models when used for this purpose:

Interpreting the results of a contribution study is a bit nuanced. Even though results show an industry’s current support of a certain level of economic activity or a certain number of jobs in the region, it is unclear what this economy would look like if the local industry truly did not exist. Many workers in the industry would likely have been employed by other industries. Many intermediate inputs purchased by the industry would likely have been sold to other industries.

It’s also not clear that the researchers really avoided double-counting, despite claiming to. Because the code and data used to tabulate these numbers are not published alongside the report itself, this is not a matter I can easily speak to. The disparity between the numbers publicly available for employment in the oil and gas sector and those presented by LMOGA strongly suggest that their numbers are fudged, and the fact that this is a report from an industry association with an intended audience in the state legislature strongly suggests an incentive to fudge the numbers.

Furthermore, economists recognize limitations of RIMS models when used to estimate an industry’s contributions to a regional economy, the type of thing LMOGA is doing here. Researchers at the Bureau for Economic Analysis caution (italics mine):

RIMS II multipliers are created to estimate the total impacts resulting from incremental changes in final demand. Because the model is based on existing industry relationships, RIMS II multipliers are not well-suited to estimate the total contribution of an existing industry to a local economy.

Indeed, it is preferred to take the direct reading, as I do:

Instead of using multipliers to estimate an industry’s contribution to a local economy, simply researching the earnings and employment associated with an industry in a local economy may be a better alternative. Albeit conservative, this alternative also provides information regarding the importance of the industry to the local economy.

So the 250,000-300,000 number is worse than an overestimation. It is the result of a dishonest use of an economic model, with the explicit aim of misinforming voters and state law-makers of the actual economic impacts of the fossil fuel industry.

The roughly 2,000 drilling workers in the state should by now be well aware that the biggest threat to their jobs is not environmental regulation, but the over-exploitation of fossil fuel deposits and the relentless march of automation. Thousands of Louisiana oil and gas workers did not lose their jobs over the last decade and a half because Louisiana suddenly started enforcing environmental laws (even under Democrat governor John Bel Edwards, the government was positively obsequious towards fossil fuel interests). Other industries, like commercial fishing, directly support a substantially greater number of jobs. Commercial fishing itself, which is directly threatened by pollution from fossil fuel extraction, is said to support over 18,900 jobs by Southwick Associates in a 2019 report for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, greater than nine times the number of jobs supported by oil and gas drilling according to the BLS.

The notion proffered by fossil fuel shills is that if we regulate the fossil fuel capitalists, they will be so offended that they’ll leave the state, wrecking the state economy. This captures a relationship of dependency between the state’s workforce and the good graces of the fossil fuel capitalists that for some reason many Louisianans are all too eager to accept. The reason, however, that fossil fuel capitalists extract our fossil fuels at all is because the fossil fuels are located here. They do not have to be given the velvet glove treatment. If they want to make a profit by exploiting our minerals and our workforce, they will do so regardless of the so-called “regulatory burden”, because not doing so means a competitor with a greater regulatory tolerance will eat their market share. Louisiana’s regulatory negligence is an outcome of politicians being bought off by fossil fuel capital, but this defect of our political regime is not a prerequisite for fossil fuel capital to be willing to invest in Louisiana at all.

And what of the workers? Besides the lesson to be drawn from Where Are We Gonna Work (When the Trees Are Gone?), there are many good reasons for workers to want better regulation of the oil and gas sector and conservation of the fossil fuels that are still in the ground. Oil and gas workers on the job are exposed to some of the harshest pollutants and toxic chemicals known to man. Frack water, for example, is now known to contain radioactive waste, and workers on the job are not provided with safety equipment commensurate to the risks they face when handling frack waste, among other carcinogenic waste products of the fossil fuel industry. The social costs of fossil fuel extraction and processing in this state also come down disproportionately on poor communities, with petrochemical production in South Louisiana being known to contribute to higher than average incidences of cancer in poor communities along “cancer alley”, and this is only scratching the surface on the social costs of fossil fuel production.

Louisiana will not lose out if we finally begin to make steps toward the regulation of a sector that has long been wrecking Louisiana’s environment and poisoning its people with virtual impunity. Well-paid hack researchers do the state a disservice by polluting our discourse with dishonest and untrue factoids like those criticized above. Shame on them.