Oil is dropping due to travel restrictions and lockdowns amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, and the decline in demand for oil and gas extraction could have a major impact on certain US cities that rely on the industry.
Oil prices fell below zero for the first time on Monday. West Texas Intermediate crude oil closed May contracts at negative $37.63 a barrel. Although US oil prices went back up on Thursday to over $16 a barrel, Goldman Sachs experts believe prices could fall into the negatives again.
To get a better understanding of how this turbulence could affect the economies of different cities around the US, we looked at how much mining and oil account for the percentage share of the GDP for all US cities — and isolated the ones that could be most hurt by the oil drop.
We used 2018 GDP figures of mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction, as well as total GDP by metro, from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and then ranked the metros by the calculated percentages.
Midland, Texas, had the largest share at 66.21%, as $21.7 billion of its $32.8 billion in total GDP came from mining and oil and gas extraction. Following around 20 percentage points behind was Wheeling, West Virginia, at 46.15% or $5.7 billion of its $12.4 billion in total GDP.
Some other cities on the top of the list are located in Colorado, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.
The following are the 18 US cities with the largest share of mining and oil from the city's overall GDP:
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