Veteran attorneys Timothy Miller from Robinson & McElwee, and Christopher ‘Kip” Power, Mychal Schulz and Robert Stonestreet from the Charleston office of Dinsmore & Shohl have joined forces with Babst Calland in providing senior-level legal counsel in key practice areas including environmental, litigation and employment. The addition of the new attorneys and staff will double the size of Babst Calland’s Charleston office which opened in 2011. For more information, please visit the firm’s website.
Workforce West Virginia Investment Council has released findings that cite a 20 percent jump in oil and gas industry employment last year, the West Virginia Gazette reports. During the same period, the average wage for workers in the industry has also risen by nearly $5,500. The rise in employment is focused in the regions where Marcellus Shale activity is the highest, and the growth can be seen in ancillary industries as well. Particularly, the pipeline and storage tank construction sector has experienced significant growth corresponding to the oil and gas industry.
As expected, the recent increase in shale production and exploration has caused a major increase in job creation in the oil and gas industry, recent reports show. According to data released by the Energy Information Administration and the U.S. Department of Labor, over a six year period ending in 2012, industry employment jumped 40%, or approximately 162,000 jobs. By comparison, the entire private sector in America grew by just 1%, or approximately one million jobs.
The Labor Department numbers show that the job creation seen in the “extraction” and “support” subcategories of the industry have grown the most. Extraction jobs, which range from exploration through some aspects of production, grew by nearly 40%. Similarly, support jobs, which are limited to areas like excavation and well construction and maintenance, and do not include housing and manufacturing data, grew by approximately 55% between 2007 and 2012.
The growth in industry employment is necessary to sustain the nation’s rising energy production; over the same six-year period, domestic crude oil production grew 39%, while natural gas production increased by 25%.