Mining, quarrying, oil & gas
The share of jobs within commuting reach of a tract that are in mining, quarrying, or oil and gas extraction, and how that share has moved over five years.
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Of all the jobs within commuting reach of a tract, the share that are in mining, quarrying, or oil and gas extraction. This describes the composition of the nearby job market rather than its size.
The Census Bureau defines the sector as comprising "establishments that extract naturally occurring mineral solids, such as coal and ores; liquid minerals, such as crude petroleum; and gases, such as natural gas," with "mining" used "in the broad sense to include quarrying, well operations, beneficiating (e.g., crushing, screening, washing, and flotation), and other preparation customarily performed at the mine site." The sector "distinguishes two basic activities: mine operation and mining support activities" (2022 NAICS Manual), so contract drillers and exploration services are counted here alongside the operators themselves.
Extraction employment is anchored to geology rather than to population, which makes this the most spatially concentrated of the twenty sectors. Across most of the country the share is near zero; where it is not, the local economy is usually tied to a specific basin, coal field, or quarry. The sector is also cyclical in a way tied to commodity prices rather than to the local business cycle, so a place with a meaningful mining share carries exposure to markets set far away.
Metrics in this family#
Considerations#
These data count jobs at the workplace, not at the worker's home. Extraction sites in particular draw workers from long distances and from temporary quarters, so the workplace location and the workforce's residence can diverge sharply.
The Census Bureau protects employer confidentiality before publication. The disclosure limitation applied to "the workplace component of LODES uses employer-level input noise infusion" (McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30), so published values for a small area are perturbed relative to the underlying counts. This matters more for a sector with few, large establishments than for a diffuse one.
Coverage is jobs subject to state unemployment insurance, plus federal workers from 2010 onward (OnTheMap Data Overview). The reference period is the second quarter of each year.
Two gaps carry through from the published files: Alaska has no workplace data after 2016 and Michigan none after 2021. Tracts there show no value rather than a zero, and those gaps are not distributed evenly with respect to where extraction happens.
The twenty sector shares sum to one, so a rise here is arithmetically a fall elsewhere.
Birdseye derives these shares from the sector job counts the Census Bureau publishes; the shares themselves are not a published series.
References#
- 12022 NAICS Manualhttps://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
- 2McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2020/CES-WP-20-30.pdf
- 3OnTheMap Data Overviewhttps://lehd.ces.census.gov/doc/help/onthemap/OnTheMapDataOverview.pdf