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Alaska's oil workforce has been hit hard by low prices, yet the companies in the state have managed to buck a longstanding trend and increase production for the last two years. So what gives?
For state Labor Department Economist Neal Fried, the curiosity in the numbers goes back further than when oil prices started tumbling from the $100-plus per banei plateau in August 2014.
"The whole trend in oil production and employment has been very interesting just because in 2015 we reached a record number of employees in oil and gas in the state's history, which is pretty amazing given the fact that we were producing significantly less than our peak in 1988 or for many years before that," Fried noted.
He said that the decade-long run-up in oil and gas sector jobs exceeded the generally accepted notion that oil fields - the three primary North Slope fields are 17 to 40 years old - require more investment as they age.
In 2006, Alaska had an average of 9,600 oil industry workers, according to the state Labor Department. That year Trans-Alaska Pipeline System throughput averaged just more than 759,000 barrels per day.
By the peak of industry employment in 2015, just before priceinduced layoffs started taking their toll, oil accounted for about 14,200 jobs while TAPS carried just 508,000 barrels per day, the lowest annual production level in the history of the North Slope.
Fried attributes the employment boom to the peak oil price years of 2011 to 2014.
"Without that magical price I don't expect that it would've ever happened but it still was surprising," he said of the workforce expansion. "It kind of humbled anyone that makes any kind of long-term forecast on any industry."
However, the script has flipped in less than two years. So far this year Alaska has averaged 10,600 oil industry jobs, the fewest since 2006, while TAPS throughput is at nearly 523,000 barrels per day, according to the pipeline owner Alyeska Pipeline Service Co.
The last month Alaska North Slope crude averaged more than $60 per barrel was June 2015.
North Slope oil production has generally declined at about 5 percent per year with few exceptions since peaking in 1988 at just more than 2 million barrels per...