The Data Center, which is in New Orleans, says job growth in Louisiana since 2015 has increased by less than 1%, well below the U.S. average of 11.5%. Dr. Alex Kolker helped put the report together and says Louisiana’s economy has not been the same since the oil price crash of 2014.
“There were big job losses, on the order of about 30,000 jobs; in upstream, in the drilling sector, after the 2014 oil price crash, Kolker said.
Kolker says Louisiana is down about 15,000 jobs in the drilling sector of the economy. He says Louisiana is also down about 5,000 jobs in water transportation, which involve taking people to offshore rigs.
Kolker says the state’s energy employment profile has moved away from offshore drilling jobs to short-term construction booms tied to liquefied natural gas and petrochemical projects.
“You can see there’s big spikes in employment. But, often, it’s only a couple of years where there’s this spike in employment, and then employment drops,” Kolker noted.
Kolker says oil and gas still provide comparatively high-paying, middle-skill jobs, but it’s not an industry that Louisiana can rely on to grow its employment numbers.
“Can we come up with other parts of the economy that are less tied to oil and gas, so that we can be more diversified for when these price crashes come?” Kolker asked.
Oil prices dropped nearly 50% in the second half of 2014.
Here is the full report.
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