Oilonomics: Making sense of the impact of hydrocarbon production on socio-economics

The development of the oil and gas industry has stimulated local economic growth by creating employment opportunities., attracting migrants, and increasing local business investments. While previous research shows controversial results of the oil and gas industry's influence on the local society, very few studies concentrated on visualizing the effect of such influences and predicting the trends to serve business, local government, job seekers, and the public. This study demonstrates correlations between oil/gas production and the socio-economic variables over time with multiple massive data sets extracted from official websites. Our initial attempt is to visualize such correlations and trends in Colorado while possibly generalize to the national and even international levels for further study.