Fossil fuel workers have the skills to succeed in green jobs, but location is a major barrier to a just transition

As the U.S. shifts away from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources, thousands of coal, oil and gas workers will be looking for new jobs.

Many will have the skills to step into new jobs in the emerging clean energy industries, but the transition may not be as simple as it seems. New research published in the journal Nature Communications identifies a major barrier that is often overlooked in discussions of how to create a just transition for these workers: location.

We analyzed 14 years of fossil fuel employment and skills data and found that, while many fossil fuel workers could transfer their skills to green jobs, they historically have not relocated far when they changed jobs.

That suggests that it’s not enough to create green industry jobs. The jobs will have to be where the workers are, and most fossil fuel extraction workers are not in regions where green jobs are expected to grow.

Without careful planning and targeted policies, we estimate that only about 2% of fossil fuel workers involved in extraction are likely to transition to green jobs this decade. Fortunately, there are ways to help smooth the transition.

Many fossil fuel and green skills overlap

As of 2019, about 1.7 million people worked in jobs across the fossil fuels industry in the U.S., many of them in the regions from Texas and New Mexico to Montana and from Kentucky to Pennsylvania. As the country transitions from fossil fuel use to clean energy to protect the climate, many of those jobs will disappear.

Policymakers tend to focus on skills training when they talk about the importance of a just transition for these workers and their communities.

To see how fossil fuel workers’ skills might transfer to green jobs, we used occupation and skills data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to compare them. These profiles provide information about the required workplace skills for over 750 occupations, including earth drillers, underground mining machine operators and other extraction occupations.

Overall, we found that many fossil fuel workers involved in extraction already have similar skills to those required in green occupations,  PREVIOUS：ALFED report investigates impact of global conflict on the UK aluminium industry NEXT：Steel belt conveying direction