The number of jobs in Louisiana’s oil and natural gas industry—more than 260,000—could fill LSU’s Tiger Stadium more than twice over, says state economist Loren Scott as he defends the sector’s importance in his latest study—“The Energy Sector: Still a Giant Economic Engine for the Louisiana Economy”—funded by the industry-backing Grow Louisiana Coalition.
Baton Rouge area workers would take up about 2,280 of those seats in Death Valley.
And those, the study shows, are high-paying jobs: In West Baton Rouge Parish, the average annual income for an energy industry job is $131,986, which is $78,000 more than the median income in the parish. An East Baton Rouge Parish industry worker’s average annual income is more than double the parish median.
Published in the wake of coastal erosion litigation, a Bayou Bridge Pipeline standstill and thousands of industry layoffs, the report paints a flattering portrait of the state’s energy sector. Oil and gas leaders have as recently as August said lingering low commodity prices are plaguing their companies.
Still, the study maintains that for every energy sector job created, another three are created in other sectors. In 2017, Baton Rouge’s ExxonMobil Refinery, for instance, employed 3,724 people, but about two-thirds of those people worked for groups like Performance Contractors and Turner Industries.
The sector pays more than $22 million in local property taxes, the study finds, continuously fueling the area’s economy as the fate of the much-contested Industrial Tax Exemption Program remains iffy.
Scott’s 2018 update is the sixth edition of an industry analysis he has been working on since 1996. Check out the full report here.
