Even amid record production, oil and gas industry employment is down 128,700 from its mid-2014 peak.

The US is the world’s top producer of oil and natural gas, and its production of both has been breaking records this year.

The US Is Breaking Records Again in Oil and Gas Production

This simple and indisputable reality has been getting remarkably little public attention in the US even as it helps bring down inflation worldwide, enables Western Europe to get by without Russian natural gas and otherwise reshapes the global economy and geopolitics. There are clear political reasons for this: President Biden and other Democrats would rather not talk about oil and gas production breaking records because a big part of their political base thinks the US should shut down domestic oil and gas production; Republican front-runner Donald Trump and the rest of his party would rather not talk about it because they want voters to believe that Biden has shut down domestic oil and gas production.

There’s also a more straightforward reason the oil and gas boom isn’t being celebrated: It doesn’t feel like a boom in the places where oil and gas is produced. Even amid those production records, industry employment is down 128,700 from its mid-2014 peak and down 41,200 from just before the pandemic in February 2020. And while employment has risen from its early 2021 low, the job gains seem to have stalled last summer.

A Lot Fewer Oil and Gas Jobs

Oil and gas workers are also getting paid less in real terms than before the pandemic. In fact, as employment in the industry continues to shift from oil and gas companies themselves to lower-paying service providers, average pay overall is lower than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation.

Real Pay Is Down Lately for Oil and Gas Workers

The oil and gas jobs crunch has regional impacts. Of the 10 states where nonfarm payroll employment still hasn’t recovered from its early-in-the-pandemic collapse, four (Louisiana, West Virginia, North Dakota and Alaska) have a significant oil and gas industry presence. Texas, home to 61% of US oil and gas jobs in November, is of course booming despite the industry’s cutbacks. But as a result, oil and gas exploration and production now directly account for just 1.5% of the state’s jobs, down from 2.6% in 2014.

Oil and gas make up a much larger share than that of Texas’s gross domestic product — around 9.5% in 2022, which is the most recent such data available. But that’s kind of the point here. The productivity of the US oil and gas industry has exploded.

More Energy Per Worker

This is another way of looking at the big shift in oil and gas industry priorities that my fellow Bloomberg Opinion columnists Javier Blas and Liam Denning have been describing for a while now. “Shale pioneers once put growth over profit, burning billions of dollars in the process,” Javier summed up last April, “today, they are focused on making money for their shareholders.” With US oil production expected to plateau in about five years and natural gas production to grow only slowly, this tightfistedness is likely to continue.

All this puts the US political divide over oil and gas in a certain amount of perspective. It’s definitely true that Democratic policies can be expected to lead to less domestic oil and gas production over time than Republican ones. But over the short to medium term, other factors predominate, and employment in the sector seems headed downward regardless.