Future of Houston #4: Would Fortune 500 Companies Stay in Houston?
Here we continue our series which asks: "what will happen to Houston, the energy capital of the world, if the response to climate change requires us to move away from oil and gas". In previous posts, we took seriously the claim that Houston could end up like Cleveland, a once booming industrial city whose population has been on a downward spiral for several decades. One question was why would major companies leave a metro area taking jobs with them, like with Cleveland ? Here we explore this question in detail. -- Let’s assume oil and gas declines as a proportion of energy consumption globally over time. What will happen to the major companies that extracted, refined, and distributed it for so long? As of 2022, Houston is home to about 25 “Fortune 500” companies. About half of those are in the oil and gas business. In total about 5,000 energy firms are in Houston and about 31% of all US jobs in oil and gas are there as well. Th...