Fracking Jobs Prove Elusive for Coal Miners Looking to Switch
(Bloomberg) -- Robert Dennis has mined coal in West Virginia for 10 years but a recent evening found him in a classroom at his local community college. He came to learn about opportunities in fracking, a drilling technique used to produce natural gas — the very fuel that is threatening coal’s future.
“I know mining inside and out,” said Dennis, a 41-year-old shift foreman from Wetzel County, adjusting the black Adidas cap on his head. But now, “I just want more doors to be open.”
He has earned a certificate in chemical and industrial operations, diligently searched job boards and filled out applications. So far, no luck.
Dennis is learning a hard lesson of fracking: While it has created a bonanza of jobs, displaced coal miners and their communities are sometimes left out of the boom. That’s because many of the jobs require highly technical skills and are often going to experienced workers brought in from out of state who then move on to the next job without sinking roots.
“There are positive employment and wage effects,” said Timothy M. Komarek, a professor of economics at Old Dominion University in Virginia. But, he said, they are “not as big as first thought when the boom first started.”
Komarek concluded in a 2016 study that total employment in a county rises by 7 percent and wages by 11 percent in the three years after fracking comes — but the gains then taper off.
When the “shale gale” hits, hotels, trailer parks and restaurants get a boost. And some landowners make money for letting drillers extract oil and gas from their property.
In that way, fracking has “created a lot of millionaires in West Virginia,” said Jeff Kessler, a former state senator from the state’s northern area that has both coal and natural gas. “But it has not created the employment opportunities” area residents had hoped for, he said. “The ongoing benefits are relatively minute compared to the amount of land under lease.”
That’s bad news for towns like Wetzel County’s New Martinsville where Dennis attended the community college session. While coal mines provide decades of steady work and sustain communities, a crew can frack a well in a month and leave behind automated machinery to recover the oil and gas.
The process, also known as hydraulic fracturing, involves injecting water and chemicals deep underground to break up rock and free trapped oil and gas.
It’s unlocked vast stores of previously unobtainable fossil fuel and spurred a renaissance in energy production in states that had once been coal bastions. Coal, oil and natural gas are formed from the same plant matter and other forms of prehistoric life and can be found in the same places.
But fracking has eroded the status of coal, which used to generate more than half the electricity in the U.S. but had slipped to just 30 percent last year. “If there was a War on Coal, it was really declared by natural gas,” said Robert Godby, an economist at the University of Wyoming.
While some miners are hoping President Donald Trump will rescue their industry — West Virginia gave Trump 69 percent of the vote in 2016, the greatest share of the total in at least a century and a half — others are eyeing gas as an alternative employment opportunity.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t specifically count fracking jobs, but says there were more than 422,000 jobs directly associated with oil and gas extraction in the U.S. at the end of 2016. That has far eclipsed the number of jobs in underground coal mining: about 50,000 nationwide, down from 200,000 in the 1970s.
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