NEW YORK – Lower crude oil prices may have helped fuel record-low prices at the pump last year, but they’re coming at cost to the oil industry employees.

The Wall Street Journal writes that thousands of oil-field workers have lost their jobs, citing the increase in oil industry unemployment as fallout from last year’s drop in crude oil prices that has all but dried up fracking operations at well sites.

Since crude prices began dropping in 2014, the Journal notes that energy companies have announced plans to lay off more than 100,000 workers worldwide. So far, about 91,000 layoffs have transpired, the majority coming from oil-field services and drilling companies, according to Graves & Co. research. 

The layoffs are also showing up in federal employment data. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, direct employment in oil and gas extraction, which had grown by more than 50,000 jobs since 2007, declined by about 3,000 jobs since peaking in October at 201,500. Furthermore, 12,000 jobs have disappeared from the larger category of energy support since it reached 337,600 jobs in September, reports the Journal.

Layoffs are happening across the entire industry, from office workers and high-skilled employees such as geologists and petroleum engineers, but the “roughnecks” are seeing the most cuts. “The closer your job is to the actual oil well, the more in jeopardy you are of losing that job,” Tim Cook, oil and gas recruiter and president of PathFinder Staffing, told the Journal, adding, “Each time an oil rig gets shut down, all the jobs at the work site are gone. They disappear.”

According to data from Baker Hughes Inc., the number of working U.S. oil and gas rigs has dropped 46% so far this year to 988, the lowest level in more than five years.