Shale gas, hospital hiring boosts PA jobs to US level: report
Thanks to natural gas, hospital hiring
Shale gas, hospital hiring boosts PA jobs to US level: report
Joseph N. DiStefano
"The Pennsylvania economy is currently expanding at a pace faster than at any point during the 2003-07 expansion," writes Jay Bryson, global economist for Wells Fargo Securities, in a new report. Citing Federal reserve data, Bryson finds that Pennsylvania has been adding jobs as fast as the nation as a whole. By contrast, Pennsylvania lagged the U.S. during most of the 2000s (and has trailed the U.S. as a whole for years, as Bryson noted in a report last year.) Can we thank natural gas and the fracking technology that Govs. Corbett and Rendell and the General Assembly have invited to the state's northern tier and western ridges? Some, at least: "The natural resources and mining sector, which employs less than 1 percent of the commonwealth's workers, has accounted for 8 percent of the overall job growth in Pennsylvania" since hiring bottomed in February 2010, Bryson writes. It's not all shale, Bryson adds: Schools and hospitals, with 20% of all state jobs, added 30% of total new jobs. (By contrast, the number of Pennsylvania workers employed by government agencies and financial services firms have been falling.) Job growth has been three times faster in the 14 northern and western "shale counties" than in the rest of the state, Bryson notes. In Williamsport, shale has created a noticeable "boom," with mining, hotel and restuarant jobs accounting for "nearly 40%" of total job gains despite employing less than 20% of local workers. This growth might not be "sustainable" as drillers like Chesapeake Energy are already cutting back due to the cheap price of gas, Bryson warns. He's pointed out before that gas will only benefit the state long-term if industries locate big plants here that hire lots of people to take advantage of cheap gas, which hasn't happened yet.
I asked if the surge in truck-driver hiring reported by Philly-area driver schools can be attributed to gas drilling -- That's not happening up in the Williamsport area, where the most noticeable gas hiring has been concentrated, Bryson told me. Finally, Bryson asks, is gas development "worth it?" To know that, you'd have to calculate the impact of local property inflation and long-term environmental costs, he says; and he's not prepared to count that yet.
Co-generation energy plants, producing electricity as well as heat or steam should be built on an industrial scale next to the high power transmission lines feeding the electric grid. Or run the transmission lines to the power plants next to the gas fields so we don't have to build gas pipelines. We can export value added electricity and support industries that can use the co-generated heat, such as agricultural usages.
