Perhaps you’ve heard this before: shale oil and gas production is like manufacturing.

When I was working as a reporter covering natural gas markets for Platts, prior to becoming a web editor, I never thought of this, despite regularly writing about production and technology.

But Michael Tribolet, managing director at Wells Fargo Bank and part of the US corporate banking power and utilities group, said at a recent spring conference on financing in energy that shale production could be called “more manufacturing than wildcatting, the way it was 15 years ago.”

When he said that, I immediately thought he was exaggerating. But the more I think about it, the more I see his point, as well as seeing problems with the analogy.

I asked a mud engineer neighbor who works in the Eagle Ford for his thoughts, and he immediately agreed that the production he’s involved with is like manufacturing. There’s a great deal of certainty to oil and gas production these days, thanks to technology, and one of the hallmarks of manufacturing is being able to reliably replicate both tasks and products, he said.

My sticking points with this idea have to do with worker stability and safety. To me, manufacturing means factories and workers who become a mainstay of a community, with a factory of some sort providing the workforce with stability, possibly for decades or centuries. (OK, so what really came to mind was Detroit, back in the heyday of American car manufacturing.)

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Oil and gas production, on the other hand, seems much more transient. Sure, energy company headquarters and offices are set in a community, but many workers are spread out on drill sites across counties, states, countries and even offshore. Workers might migrate with the jobs, such as with the “man camps” in the Bakken, and countless towns across the US have been subject to the boom-and-bust cycle that comes from oil and gas production. The fall from prosperity to financial flailing happens in manufacturing, too (this is my second shout-out to Detroit), but it seems to happen faster when oil is involved.

And when it comes to safety, I turned to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where oil and gas extraction is classified as a subsector of mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction, although one can find stats regarding only the oil and gas extraction subsector. Oil and gas extraction is a tiny workforce, with roughly 208,100 employees estimated for March 2014, and only makes up about a quarter of all total mining, quarrying, and extraction jobs (a total of around 841,800 employees).

Manufacturing, on the other hand, is a massive sector of some 12.08 million employees, including subsectors ranging from food manufacturing to computer and electronic product manufacturing to transportation equipment manufacturing to chemical manufacturing.

The BLS makes it clear that oil and gas extraction is dangerous, and this subsector gets highlighted in a press release of key preliminary findings of the 2012 Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries:

“Fatal work injuries in the private mining sector rose in 2012, led by an increase in fatal injuries to workers in oil and gas extraction industries. Fatal work injuries in oil and gas extraction industries rose 23 percent to 138 in 2012, reaching a new high for the series.”

BLS data about injuries, illnesses and fatalities can be confusing, especially since there are preliminary numbers and revised numbers and it can be hard to find comparable data broken out in a palatable form. But according to 2012 tables linked to in the BLS press release, linked above, the oil and gas extraction subsector had 26 fatalities in 2012, and mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction as a whole had 181.

Manufacturing, on the other hand, had 327 fatalities. With those numbers, you can figure out that 327 fatalities out of the estimated 12.08 million employees in manufacturing (roughly 0.0027% of manufacturing employees died) is less than the 26 fatalities out of roughly 208,100 oil and gas extraction employees (0.01249%).

Neither of these industries are particularly dangerous for fatalities—although work-related injury and illness rates would be worth looking into as well. Both manufacturing and oil and gas extraction are largely dependent on the marriage of technology and highly skilled workers, who are true experts of their jobs, and this has kept each the fatality numbers down in each industry.

And that brings me back around to the central question. It’s hard for me to really tease apart these two industries; I feel like it’s the difference between apples and oranges. They’re different fruits, but they have a lot in common.

This is a question I’m still asking neighbors and friends, especially those who are other energy journalists or work in the oil and gas industry. It’s one I want to pose here, too: what do you think? Is oil and gas shale production basically like manufacturing at this point in time? And do you think it will change in the future? I hate to think this cocktail-party question of mine will become irrelevant anytime soon.

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