Economist Bill Gilmer is the Director of the Institute for Regional Forecasting at the University of Houston's Bauer College of Business. The fracking industry went through three rounds of bankruptcies between 2014 and 2020, completely changing the management style and financial model for the industry, he said.
, beating the previous record of $16 billion in 2019, the Texas Oil and Gas Association reported in January. Rounding out last year’s 10 best-performing Houston-based public companies was No. 5 Southwestern Energy, No. 7 Murphy Oil and No. 9 Cheniere Energy. The company, which increased its service-fleet capacity by about a third through its 2021 acquisition of Alamo Pressure Pumping and now employs about 4,600 people, generated net income of $315 million in 2022, compared with a $119.4 million net loss in 2021.
As a result, Houston’s oil and gas producers have since been forced to take a more conservative approach by borrowing less and returning more of their cash to shareholders. Granted, by some measures, the energy sector has less of an impact on the local economy than it did a decade ago because greater technology efficiencies have cut the sector’s local labor count. Specifically, oil and gas extraction as a percentage of the Houston region’s gross domestic product fell to 3 percent in 2021 from 7.4 percent in 2015, according to the Greater Houston Partnership, citing U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis statistics.