US oil production is booming. Oil jobs are not.

As oil and gas companies increased production over the years, they employed many workers, enriching communities across the United States. That is no longer true.

The country is pumping out more oil than ever and almost record amounts of gas. But the companies that extract, transport and process those fossil fuels employ roughly 25 percent fewer workers than they did a decade earlier when they produced less fuel, according to an analysis of federal data reported by the New York Times.

Now, as some worry about a looming oil oversupply, producers are tightening their belts, with consumption across North America expected to fall 3 percent this year, according to Barclays. That raises the prospect of further job losses, even as President-elect Donald J. Trump urges companies to “drill, baby, drill.”

Oil prices have risen in recent days after President Biden announced new sanctions on Russia’s oil industry, but it is unclear how the restrictions may affect commodity prices and US producers in the long term.

The decline in U.S. oil and gas jobs is reminiscent of the long decline of the U.S. coal industry, where employment rose for decades before production fell as mining companies extracted more rock with fewer people.

Two decades into the shale boom, companies are drilling wells that reach deeper into the earth, unlocking more oil and natural gas. New technology allows them to monitor drilling, fracking and production remotely, with fewer people on site. And bigger companies are snapping up smaller players, laying off accountants, engineers and other workers along the way.

Although the total number of jobs has increased compared to the darkest days of the pandemic, far fewer people work in the industry than before Covid.

Among the cost-cutting techniques pursued by Exxon Mobil and Chevron: hiring engineers and geologists in India, where labor is cheaper, to support activities in the United States and elsewhere.

The decline in oil and gas production also reflects a continued transition to cleaner forms of energy, even if that shift is happening more slowly than many analysts predicted a few years ago.

“You’re not going to see a lot of job growth just in the basic act of producing oil and natural gas,” Chris Wright, chief executive of oilfield services company Liberty Energy, said in an interview before Mr. Trump chose to head the Department of Energy.

The industry, said Mr. Wright, “now on a trend of steady to perhaps gradual decline in employment.”

Mr. Trump will “protect our energy jobs” while lowering costs for consumers, said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the president-elect’s transition team.

During the first half of America’s fracking boom, oil and gas companies added workers much faster than other industries. The industry has nearly doubled over 10 years, boosting the economies of places like North Dakota, home of the Bakken shale formation.

Then in 2014, oil prices crashed. It took a few years, but U.S. production eventually recovered, jumping to a record of nearly 13.5 million barrels a day last fall. Employment, however, never fully recovered, entering a wave of decline punctuated by ups and downs, most recently during the pandemic, when oil prices briefly fell below zero.

Matthew Waguespack was fracking a well in early 2020 when a representative of the oil company that hired his field team walked into the crew’s mobile office in eastern New Mexico.

“Pump out all your sand, pump out all your chemicals, pack up,” Mr. Waguespack recalled the man telling the team. “And get out of here.”

It wasn’t long before Mr. Waguespack, an engineer at the oilfield services company then known as Schlumberger, was out of a job. Like more than 100,000 other oil and gas workers who lost their jobs that year as demand for fuel dried up, he wondered, “What next?”

While Mr. Waguespack was looking for work, oil and gas companies were cutting budgets and doing whatever they could to survive. They drilled ever larger wells and installed sensors and other technology that enabled remote operation. Many have turned to natural gas to power fracking equipment rather than diesel and found it to be cleaner and faster.

Heavily indebted companies failed, with more than 100 manufacturers and service companies seeking bankruptcy protection in 2020, according to law firm Haynes Boone.

By the end of 2024, the number of rigs operating in the United States has fallen roughly 28 percent in five years, federal data show. Production continued to grow.

“We’re getting three times more wells from the well today than we did in 2018 or 2019,” Bart Cahir, who heads Exxon’s shale division, said in an interview last year. “Per person, we produce a lot more.”

That the oil and gas industry has become more productive is good news for the economy, which benefits when people can do more with less, said Jesse Thompson, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

“But in the meantime,” he added, “there are businesses, individuals and communities that stand to lose.”

One consequence of the industry’s drive to increase efficiency is that oil and gas companies, known for their good pay, no longer offer such a premium over other industries. Before the pandemic, average wages in oil and gas production were more than 60 percent higher than those in manufacturing, construction and other related industries, federal data show. By last autumn, this premium had decreased to slightly more than 30 percent.

Mr. Waguespack found his way to the oil patch in 2021, more than a year after he was fired. But by then, the per diems and other incentives that made his job in the Permian Basin so lucrative had all but disappeared. Without them, Mr. Waguespack said, his annual salary drops to about $105,000, from about $130,000 in 2019, in line with what he could earn working in an office or factory at home in Louisiana.

“I started looking for other jobs, trying to get away from the oil fields,” Mr Waguespack, 30, said.

With a healthy post-Covid economy and unemployment below 4 percent nationally for more than two years starting in early 2022, he and workers like Cody Owlett, who spent a decade touring Pennsylvania pressure-washing equipment such as drills, had other possibilities.

Mr. Owlett’s job paid well for where he lived near the northern edge of the state: about $35 an hour, with more than 60 hours of overtime some weeks. But all the time he spent on the road meant he missed holidays and was rarely able to pick up his boys from school.

“I was tired of missing out on everything with them,” Mr Owlett, 34, said.

When he realized in 2023 that he could earn a similar income by buying discounted goods and reselling them on eBay, Mr. Owlett left the gas field.

Jobs like the one held by Mr. Owletts are among the most cyclical, rising and falling with oil and gas prices. Those formal jobs account for most of the work that has returned since the pandemic.

Refining — the process of turning crude oil into gasoline, diesel and other fuels — saw more permanent job losses. Even as demand for oil rises globally, many believe the appetite for gasoline in the United States and elsewhere has already peaked, with companies closing facilities to produce the fuel.

Other job losses followed mergers and acquisitions. After buying the pipeline company, Pittsburgh-based natural gas driller EQT said last fall it was cutting 15 percent of its workforce. In Texas, roughly 500 people lost their jobs as part of the recent acquisition of Marathon Oil by oil producer ConocoPhillips, state data show.

At the same time, big oil companies hire staff in countries where wages are lower.

Five to 10 years ago, Western oil and gas companies turned to places like India’s tech hub Bengaluru to fill roles in information technology, human resources and supply chain management, said Timothy Haskell, who leads EY’s energy people consulting practice. industry to the United States. Today, they gather engineers and other technical experts who form the backbone of the industry.

“Even though the U.S. labor force is shrinking, in some cases it’s growing strongly in other parts of the world,” said Mr. Haskell.

Last year, Chevron said it was opening an engineering and technology outpost in India, a billion-dollar venture that Chevron described as part of a broader cost-cutting effort.

“We’re going to change where and how we do some of our work,” Mike Wirth, Chevron’s CEO, told Bloomberg in November. More than half of Chevron’s employees are in the United States, a ratio that has been stable since at least 2014, a company spokesman said, describing the oil producer as a “proud American company.”

Exxon has a growing presence in Bengaluru. Over time, the scope of work that employees perform there has expanded from smaller, routine jobs to more important jobs. Engineers and geoscientists in the southern Indian city worked on some of the company’s flagship projects, including those off the coast of Guyana and in the United States, three former employees said.

Exxon declined to comment on its operations in India.

Mr. Waguespack eventually got the job he was looking for in Louisiana. In his new engineering role at the industrial gas supplier, he is leading a variety of projects such as replacing aging equipment at facilities throughout the Gulf Coast.

He earns slightly more than he did during his second stint at the oil plant. And instead of spending weeks commuting from Louisiana to West Texas, he lives five minutes from the office.

“To this day I still wonder what could have happened if I had stayed,” Mr Waguespack said. “But I think a good thing is happening to me now.”

Ben Casselman contributed reporting.