The Ever Improving and Safer Natural Gas Industry

Tom Shepstone
Natural Gas NOW

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Fractivists grasp at everything to diss the natural gas industry, including safety, but it turns out the industry has an ever improving record on this score.

Back in 2014, Scranton Times writer and king of snide, Chris Kelly, attacked the natural gas industry and everything and everyone connected to it on the basis of safety. I wrote a rebuttal here and noted the Times building where Kelly worked was heated with the stuff. Attacking the natural gas industry was rote in those days. Ian Urbina, the arrogant New York Times author of the “Drilling Down” also took a whack at it with this flawed piece, and I rebutted that as well. Now, more than five years later we see the long-term trend which is the ultimate rebuttal.

The long term trends are revealed in an American Petroleum Institute (API) presentation that may be found here. A single will suffice to provide the big picture:

Notice how the injury and illnesses rate for oil and natural gas industry workers was not only lower than the U.S,.private sector as a whole when the shale revolution started in 2008, but has also declined at faster rate since then. The rate of job-related nonfatal injuries and illnesses for the oil and natural gas industry was 1.7 per 100 full-time workers in 2017, compared to a rate of 2.8 for the entire U.S. private sector having declined from 74% to 61% of the average for the latter.

That’s serious progress in an already progressively improving and safer industry sector. Moreover, when we look at the pipeline sector versus all transportation, we see this:

This makes a complete mockery of the ConEd and New York State Public Service Commission plans, discussed here, to truck in natural gas rather than deliver it by pipeline, of course. It also demonstrates the overall safety of pipelines versus other methods of moving energy.

The API presentation is filled with numerous other charts and facts, but these two make the case; the natural gas industry is ever improving, ever safer and ever stronger.