Obama’s 600,000 Fracking-Job Forecast Includes Lawyers, Realtors

On January 27, 2012 — No comments

The boom in natural gas produced from shale rock will add U.S. jobs, though whether it supports as many as President Barack Obama predicts depends on how you count them, economists say.

In his State of the Union address this week, Obama said hydraulic fracturing, in which a mix of water, sand and chemicals is injected underground to free gas trapped in rock, could support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade.

The estimate was based in part on a forecast by energy researcher IHS Global Insight, which counts people who actually drill as well as “indirect jobs” in associated industries such as lawyers, cement makers and real estate agents, said John Larson, a vice president at IHS and the study’s lead author.

“Our preference is to stick to direct jobs,” Mark Muro, policy director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said in an interview. “Once one gets into indirect and induced, it becomes very hard to sort out truly new from reconfiguration of existing jobs.”

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