With national media attention focused on how candidates’ positions on fracking will impact the 2024 presidential race in Pennsylvania, a new analysis shows that the gas drilling industry is not a substantial factor in the state’s economy – undercutting a key part of the conventional wisdom guiding the discussion of the race for the White House. 

New research from the national advocacy organization Food & Water Action shows that oil and gas employment in the state is near its lowest level in a decade: In 2023, the industry directly employed just 19,452 workers, a record low in the last decade and a mere 0.32 percent of the 6 million jobs in the state.

The Trump campaign has seized on the issue, noting Kamala Harris’s past opposition to fracking and asserting this as a weakness for Harris in the must-win state.

But this presumption overestimates the importance of fracking in Pennsylvania – in part due to the industry’s long–running campaign to wildly inflate job creation numbers. Industry lobbying groups like the American Petroleum Institute routinely make outlandish claims about the fracking industry creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in Pennsylvania – claims that are nowhere near the employment statistics generated by state and federal agencies.

This mistaken sense of fracking’s relevance to the state economy feeds rampant speculation about fracking’s role in the election. Four years ago, news cycles were built around the narrative that the Biden campaign would suffer in Pennsylvania because of Donald Trump’s claims that Biden would put hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians out of work. The strategy was a failure, of course, but those false assumptions persist.

“The economic significance of fracking in Pennsylvania has been one of the great political fables of recent times. It is a fable built on propaganda from the oil and gas industry, nothing more,” said Emily Wurth, managing director of organizing at Food & Water Action. “The fact is, fracking has never been nearly as popular in Pennsylvania as the industry would have us believe. Donald Trump relied on false myths about fracking in the state four years ago – to his own peril.”

During the 2020 campaign, a CBS/YouGov poll found that a slight majority of Pennsylvania voters (52 to 48 percent) opposed fracking, while another survey of registered voters found 48 percent supported a ban on fracking. A 2021 survey by Data For Progress found that only 31 percent of voters support maintaining fracking, while 55 percent would rather see it end as soon as possible or be phased out over time.

The new Food & Water Action analysis also shows that as fossil fuel employment has stagnated across the country, renewable energy jobs have grown during the Biden/Harris administration. These trends are especially visible in states where renewable energy generation is growing. Pennsylvania has seen much lower renewable energy than the national average, so it is not enjoying the job growth of other states. In other words, the overreliance on fracking is likely costing the state jobs. 

Contact: Seth Gladstone – [email protected]