Related Stories:

• Ohio Oil and Gas Association touts 40,000 new Ohio jobs – The Truth-O-Meter says Pants on Fire!
• Shale gas will not create 200,000 Ohio jobs by 2015, Ohio State University says of industry claims

Retail sales have steadily increased in Ohio counties where shale gas is being developed, but the number of new jobs created has been small, according to an analysis released Thursday.

“Total employment growth has been much less robust than sales activity in Ohio’s shale country,” notes the Ohio Utica Shale Gas Monitor, produced quarterly by the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University.

The analysis, authored by Edward Hill, dean of Levin College and graduate student assistant Kelly Kinahan, found that total employment levels increased by less than 1 percent in 15 eastern Ohio counties where the highest number of horizontal shale wells have been drilled.

Those counties include Trumbull, Portage, Mahoning, Wayne, Stark, Columbiana, Holmes and Carroll counties.

State sales tax receipts in these and nearby counties to the south jumped by 20 percent in 2012 compared with 2011 sales taxes, the analysis found.

In the first three months of this year, sales taxes were up 14 percent compared to the first quarter of 2012.

But total employment levels grew by 0.9 percent in 2011, 0.6 percent in 2012, and 0.1 percent during the first quarter of 2013, the study found.

Hill and Kinahan note that they did not look into job growth in specific industries, such as manufacturing or construction, where growth percentages may have been much higher than overall numbers.

They attributed the slow job growth to out-of-state companies importing their own workers with highly specialized skills rather than waiting for Ohioans to be trained and to the slow construction of pipelines and plants to move and then process the gas and oil.

Future job growth will depend on whether Ohio’s shale wells produce “natural gas liquids,” or NGLs, which are used by industry and whether the price of “dry gas” used for heating, power production and manufacturing increases beyond the current prices, which are below $5 per 1,000 cubic feet, Hill and Kinahan reason.

“The degree to which the presence of NGLs changes the mid-term economic landscape of Ohio depends in no small part on where the NGLs are processed,” they warn.

“This is especially so for ethane, a critical building of block of industrial plastics.

“Large benefits will be reaped if ethane is ‘cracked’ into its commercially valuable components in or close to Ohio. Potential benefits will be reduced if it is barged or piped to Louisiana or Texas.”