Who Are Ohios Oil and Gas Producers?
OOGA members are the ultimate upstream segment of the energy industry. All Ohio producers are “independent” producers – defined as a nonintegrated company which receives nearly all of its revenues from production at the wellhead. Independents are exclusively in the exploration and production (E&P) business. Independents are not major oil companies. And, unlike the majors, they cannot recover production and regulatory costs by passing those expenses and overhead on to consumers through other operations, such as refining and marketing of petroleum products. Ohio independents provide jobs for nearly 4,623 employees. To put that in perspective, the Ohio coal extraction industry employs about 2,484 people. On a national scale, the number of independents has decreased by 50 percent over the past decade from over 10,000 to less than 5,000. And, the number of drilling operators of record has also fallen from over 5,000 to approximately 2,000. Nationally, the average independent E&P company emp
