The Superstars Who Give Us Our Superpowers

The government and the renewables industry often brag about employing so many people as a sign of growth and health of a new industry. They treat job creation as a central goal. But shouldn’t a job be a means to an end, with the “end” being the most useful product? 

They never discuss how productive these energy jobs are in what should matter most: energy production per worker. Why don’t they brag about employing very few people while powering so many? Because that’s the forte of workers in the fossil fuel and nuclear industry.

In the rich world today, Technological Man uses 100x more energy than Primitive Man. Energy access protects us in a sheltered home, helps us adapt to climate change, enables high-quality lives and access to incredible medical progress with life expectancies surpassing 80 years, gives us access to miraculous products and provides us transport to go almost anywhere we want to go, including outer space. Modern lives are wrapped in the comfort of energy. Vast quantities of energy give Technological Man superpowers.

Access to more energy makes us so much more productive than Primitive Man. But where does all that extra energy come from?

As you can see in the graph below, we use various primary energy sources. In 2021, most of our primary energy in the US, about 79%, came from fossil fuels (36% natural gas; 31% oil/NGLs; 12% coal); 8% from nuclear and 13% from various renewable sources (~3% wind and ~2% solar).

The number of workers to achieve these primary energy production levels varies significantly by sector. As shown on the title graph, achieving 65.7 quadrillion British thermal units (QBtu or Quads) of primary energy production from oil & gas required about 356,000 workers, while a larger number of workers, 434,000 workers, were needed in wind and solar power generation to produce just 5.0 Quads. 

That means an average wind and solar worker produces about 11 billion Btu per year, whereas and oil & gas worker produces 190 billion Btu per year.  An average oil & gas worker delivers 17x more energy than a low-energy renewable worker. 

An average person in the US uses 295 million Btu per year – that’s for all energy needs. For reference, that’s the equivalent of two 20-pound propane tanks per American per day! 

A solar worker who produces an average of 5.4 billion Btu/year therefore supports 18 US people’s energy needs.

Enter the superstars from the oil & gas industry. Every worker helps to create the energy craved by 650 Americans. Mining coal is even more efficient from the perspective or worker productivity. 

The Shale Revolution is making the superstars of the oil & gas industry ever more powerful. Innovation and efficiency gains have enabled our industry to do more with fewer workers: our workforce reduced by 40% since 2014 while the production of oil, natural gas and natural gas liquids almost doubled. 

These two trends have pushed the number of Americans supported by an oil & gas industry worker from about 300 people about 10 years ago to about 650 people per worker today.

A study in The Objective Standard by David McGruer confirms the productivity gap for electricity generation, where the amount of electricity produced per gas- or coal-powered energy worker is 10x higher than the electricity produced for a worker in renewables.  For primary energy the gap of 17x is larger than for electricity alone, as oil & gas have use beyond electricity (transportation, products, heat), while renewables have little use beyond electricity.

Zippia shows statistics of the huge workforce in so-called “green” energy. It touts that the industry employs a substantial share of the workforce in states like Vermont, Massachusetts, and California. If we supposed our government mandated that we become 100% solar powered for all our energy needs (forget for a moment the practicality of this change), about 19 million workers would be needed – or almost 12% of the US workforce.

If government policy is all about job creation as a goal in itself, it should consider paying low-energy workers to kick rocks, so the rest of us would not be burdened by sources that only work a few hours a day, make our grid unreliable, require overbuilding and massive backup, are only brownish green, use vast swatches of land and increase the cost of energy for everyone.

If it’s about productive job creation, let’s supercharge just a few more people into an oil & gas job. That way, just 500,000 superstars can power all 330 million Americans. Now that’s employee empowerment!