GREGORY, Texas — Energy Secretary Chris Wright told more than 100 workers Thursday in South Texas that exporting liquefied natural gas is among the most important jobs in the U.S. energy industry, which has seen oil and gas employment decline in recent years.
At Cheniere’s Corpus Christi LNG plant, Wright told reporters that President Donald Trump’s pledges to lower energy prices for U.S. consumers by increasing domestic production have sent market signals to the oil and gas industry.
“It sends a message — more supply is coming. The more supply comes, prices get pushed down. It makes it tougher for people in that business. But markets will fix that,” Wright said. “With lower energy prices, you get faster economic growth, you get more job creation. And of course, that has a … countervailing impact on prices. But you always find it ironic.”
Wright’s comments came as lower commodity prices and technological efficiency gains have led to job cuts in the oil and gas sector in fits and starts since the height of the shale boom in 2014. U.S. figures last month from the Energy Workforce & Technology Council, an industry trade group, show that roughly one-third fewer people were working in the oil patch compared with 11 years ago.
At the same time, the LNG export business is booming along the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico, which Trump has renamed the Gulf of America. A review of public documents shows that an estimated 6,000 people work at U.S. LNG export terminals and related corporate offices. The number may be understated because some data is more than a year old.
Wright was in Texas on Thursday to celebrate the signing of an export authorization to countries without U.S. free-trade agreements for Cheniere’s planned units 8 and 9 at its Corpus Christi LNG facility. In an order issued in March, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved those two new units. Cheniere then reached a final investment decision on the planned units in June.
Wright told Cheniere’s workers that natural gas is the linchpin in the Trump administration’s energy dominance agenda and will likely remain the linchpin for U.S. energy production for the foreseeable future. Trump is scheduled to speak about energy issues Friday in Corpus Christi.
“The fastest-growing energy source probably through the rest of my life is going to be natural gas,” Wright said. “Energy’s the most important industry in the world, because it enables every other industry. And the most important, fastest-growing piece of the energy sector is natural gas.”
He said a major constraint is moving U.S. gas to people around the world, adding that LNG exports are the bridge to getting energy to allies that need it.
“I would say honestly, it is hard to overstate how much what you do changes our country, changes our world and changes the life possibilities for billions of people,” Wright told the LNG workers.
Declines in oil and gas employment have come as the industry has become more efficient over time — something that’s also happened in areas such as automobiles, said Mary Landrieu, co-chair of the leadership council at the advocacy group Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future.
“You want your industries to be clean and efficient, so it’s a positive, not a negative,” Landrieu, a former Democratic senator from Louisiana, said Thursday in a phone interview.
A little more than 940,000 people worked in the U.S. oil and gas production in October 2014, the Energy Workforce & Technology Council said — the peak of a surge that followed years of decline. But jobs started disappearing quickly at the end of 2014 as OPEC launched a price war designed to squeeze the fracking-fueled shale drilling industry in the United States.
A recovery coincided with Trump’s first term that began in 2017, but industry employment crashed even harder and faster in 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold.
Employment rose as the pandemic subsided in 2021. But oil field employment has never gotten back to pre-pandemic levels even as U.S. production grew to the point that it was higher than any country in history.
Producers have been dogged lately by prices lower than their breakeven point, and some companies have had big layoffs. As the country’s easy-to-reach oil gets harder to find, there’s increasing talk of a plateau or even “peak” in production. And while oil executives have stuck with Trump, his signature tariffs have driven up the cost of steel and other oil field essentials.
The U.S. LNG industry is going to continue to grow because there’s demand for U.S. gas worldwide, Landrieu said, particularly as Europe tries to wean itself off Russian gas following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“Thank goodness that America could be there for the moment,” Landrieu said, adding, “And then when you look at the communities that have been positively impacted by new taxes and jobs for workers and trainings for workers, it’s a pretty positive American story.”
Advocates of the LNG industry also say its economic effects are far broader than the thousands of workers employed directly.
In a December 2024 report, S&P Global estimated that since 2016 the U.S. LNG industry has supported an annual average of 273,000 jobs. That is spread across direct, indirect and induced jobs. An appendix to the report said direct jobs accounted for roughly 32 percent of that total.
Direct jobs comprise those created across the LNG value chain, according to the Center for LNG, a trade group. That would include pipelines and natural gas storage, according to the study, in addition to the process of compressing the gas to 1/600th of its original volume by supercooling it to below minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit.
Hinson Peters, a spokesperson for the Center for LNG, said the number of direct jobs includes positions “throughout the LNG value” chain, because counting only the jobs at the export terminals would “paint an incomplete picture” of the terminals’ economic effects. The S&P study said there were 153,382 direct LNG jobs in 2024.
Beyond that, construction of new LNG plants can involve tens of thousands of workers.
“As the [Trump] administration seeks to reduce regulatory uncertainty for the U.S. LNG industry, the workforce has seen the impact,” Charlie Riedl, the Center for LNG’s executive director, said in a statement Thursday.
Riedl also spoke about the Biden administration’s pause on pending approvals of LNG exports that was announced in January 2024 and ended when Trump returned to office in 2025.
“The end of the LNG pause and greater project timeline certainty have enabled more durable investment in the space,” Riedl said. “Had the LNG pause continued, the annual average of jobs at risk would have surpassed 100,000.”
Cheniere had just over 1,700 full-time employees as of the end of December, according to the company’s recent 10-K annual financial report, with 94 percent of those based in the United States.
Regional growth
Southwestern Louisiana has been ground zero for the nation’s LNG boom.
In 2016, Cheniere’s Sabine Pass terminal on the Louisiana-Texas border became the first modern LNG facility to export liquefied gas from the lower 48 states. The region is home to three of the nation’s seven currently operating LNG export facilities.
In December, the United States exported 569 billion cubic feet of LNG by ship, up 39 percent from the same month in 2024, DOE said in a report published Thursday.
FERC has already approved another six LNG facilities to be built in the region. LNG companies have been on a hiring spree to help operate those new facilities, said Jim Rock, executive director of the Lake Area Industry Alliance, a trade group for heavy industry in southwestern Louisiana.
Already, the LNG industry employs about 1,300 workers in the area, Rock said. While that number may seem relatively small, Rock said LNG companies have increasingly drawn talent away from the region’s petrochemical plants and refineries.
“To attract talent, they’re paying outrageous — in my mind — salaries and benefits,” Rock said.
For locals outside of the oil and gas industry, however, the exponential growth of LNG facilities has transformed the local economy in southwestern Louisiana.
Many families in the region used to rely on fishing and shrimping for their income, said Anne Rolfes, executive director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental nonprofit.
Now, towering LNG export vessels have replaced many of the smaller fishing boats, Rolfes added.
What was once miles of marshy shoreline is now covered in concrete and iron, she said.
“True energy security means that we would keep our natural resources in the country and be prepared for the future,” Rolfes said. “But instead, this is just a get-rich-quick scheme, and we’re shipping it out as fast as they can get it from the earth.”
Webb reported from Texas, Soraghan reported from North Carolina and Anchondo reported from Washington.
