Labor

Coal Miners Aren’t Having Much Luck Finding Jobs In Fracking

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Fracking has provided states with a major economic boon, but coal miners in West Virginia are having a tough time making the transition.

“If there was a War on Coal, it was really declared by natural gas,” Robert Godby, an economist at the University of Wyoming, told Bloomberg Friday. Rapid advancements in fracking technology has enabled power plants to switch from coal to natural gas, which is a lower-cost, cleaner-burning, fossil fuel.

The rise in hydraulic fracking provided thousands of Americans good paying jobs following the height of the Great Recession but coal miners were not necessarily huge winners in the shift away from black gold.

Total employment in the U.S. rose by 7 percent and wages rose by 11 percent in the three years after fracking began to take a serious hold, according to a 2016 study by Timothy Komarek, a professor at Old Dominion University. Following the three-year boon, employment started to drop again.

In West Virginia, the heart of coal country, some landowners have made big bucks by selling rights to drill on their property, but the employment situation for miners is different. The number of coal miners has been cut in half from 23,000 in 2011 to 11,500 in 2017, according to Bloomberg.

The rise in fracking has been devastating to the coal industry across the country. Coal used to generate over half of the electricity in the United States, but now accounts for just over 30 percent.

Rapid advancement in hydraulic fracturing created a massive energy boom in states like North Dakota. The sudden rush to strike it rich brought thousands and thousands of people to the North Dakota to either frack for oil or to find work in the surrounding service industries that sprouted up due to the population explosion.

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