Appalachia

By Mark Brown, Union Jake, Adam Keller, et. al. - Valley Labor Report, June 14, 2024

By Reid Frazier - Alleghany Front, May 30, 2024

A coalition of community and environmental groups is calling on the Department of Energy to suspend talks with a hydrogen hub in Appalachia and disclose more information about the project.

The Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub, or ARCH2, was one of seven “clean hydrogen hubs” awarded by the Department of Energy last year. 

“Very little information has been shared, and the concerns have only continued to be raised by the public,” says Tom Torres, hydrogen campaign coordinator for the Ohio River Valley Institute, which wrote a letter to the agency outlining its complaints.

The hub is a consortium of companies, governments and nonprofits that will produce hydrogen from natural gas. The DOE awarded the hub up to $925 million to produce “low-carbon” hydrogen. 

But how it will do this, and where companies will build these projects, remains unclear, Torres said. 

The groups are asking the hub to disclose information like site locations for the hydrogen projects involved in ARCH 2, as well as track records of developers associated with them. They also want community groups to be involved in negotiations, planning, construction and operation of the hub. 

“[T]he Department has done little to establish the necessary conditions for ‘deep, deep partnership,’” according to the letter, which was signed by the Ohio River Valley Institute and 54 other groups. (Ohio River Valley Institute is supported by The Heinz Endowments, which also funds The Allegheny Front.)

The letter adds that the agency has offered “scant” public information about the project: “[L]ittle more than four approximate, selectively designed, preliminary maps…and project descriptions as short as three words — and no substantive opportunity to shape this proposal while negotiations continue behind closed doors,”

Jill Hunkler, executive director of Ohio Valley Allies, a community group, said in a statement that “even the most basic details” of the project are lacking. 

“Impacted communities deserve to be informed and have their voices included in the negotiation phase,” Hunkler said. “How can we take this process seriously when the DOE has yet to answer the questions presented to them by concerned citizens in our region?”

Announced last year, the hydrogen hubs were meant to kick start a low-carbon hydrogen network around the country. When used for energy, hydrogen emits no carbon dioxide. But making hydrogen from natural gas – the most common way it is manufactured – produces carbon dioxide emissions. ARCH2 developers have said they may use carbon capture technology to store those emissions and, in the process, create 21,000 jobs. 

By Susan Phillips - Alleghany Front, April 30, 2024

On the campus of a former DuPont facility in Newark, Delaware, a group of researchers are working to create what they say is key to solving the world’s climate crisis — an affordable way to make hydrogen using renewable energy.

“It’s not a question of technical feasibility. It is a question of figuring out what is the lowest cost to produce that hydrogen,” said Balsu Lakshmanan, chief technology officer for the start-up Versogen. “We are displacing bad hydrogen with good hydrogen.”

“Bad hydrogen”

The world is full of what he referred to as “bad hydrogen.” Nearly all the hydrogen used today is made with natural gas, in a process known as “steam methane reformation,” or through coal using gasification. And while hydrogen burns clean when used in fuel cell cars, trucks and buses — emitting only water vapor — climate warming gasses like carbon dioxide are released during hydrogen production.

Ten million metric tons of hydrogen are produced in the U.S. every year. More than 1,600 miles of pipeline transports it — primarily in the Gulf Coast.

The bulk of the hydrogen is not used to power vehicles but as part of oil refining, including those in the Philadelphia region. It’s also used to help feed us all — it’s used to make ammonia, a key ingredient in fertilizer.

By Nick Messenger, Kathy Hipple, and Anne Keller - Ohio River Valley Institute, January 25, 2024

In November 2022, over ten years after Shell’s first public announcement of site selection for the project, and after five years of construction, Shell Chemical Appalachia Polymers opened its ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. The plant, which refines ethane, a natural gas liquid, into plastic pellets used to produce single-use plastics, was heralded as the beginning of a plastics industry renaissance in Appalachia. At least one local economic development organization estimated it would support nearly 600 direct employees and could generate 11,000 jobs in the Pittsburgh area.

Now, just over one year since production officially began, the plant has been mired in problems. The facility exceeded its allotted pollution limits within months of operating and repeated flaring has deepened air quality and health concerns of Beaver County residents. Furthermore, the plant seems to have fallen short so far in generating the economic benefits promised to residents, as Beaver County continues to trail the state across most economic metrics. This poor economic and environmental performance comes despite Shell receiving billions of dollars in state and local tax exemptions that carry an opportunity cost for taxpayers—namely, that alternative uses of the funds could have been used to grow the regional economy in more direct ways, such as to support small businesses, improve workforce development, or develop projects within industries that already have a strong history, complete with supply chains, in the region.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Jon Hurdle - Inside Climate News, August 23, 2023

Natural gas production in the Appalachian region of the United States has failed to produce promised increases in jobs and income since the fracking boom began there in the late 2000s, with economic stagnation likely to persist now that output of the fuel has passed its peak, according to a report issued on Tuesday.

The study from the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit research group, found that gas-producing areas of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia lost more than 10,000 jobs from 2008 to 2021 and that their personal income growth trailed that of the three states and the U.S. as a whole. Their population dropped by more than 46,000 during the period.

Even though gross domestic product of the 22-county region surged at four times the rate of the states overall from 2008 to 2019, little of that new wealth helped local economies because natural gas investment is mostly made in capital, not labor, and because many of the industry’s workers came from distant areas like Texas or Oklahoma where oil and gas skills were more readily available, the report said.

“GDP, which is often cited as a principal barometer of economic health, failed to produce commensurate gains in local measures of prosperity and well-being, including job, income and population growth,” it said.

By Sean O'Leary - Ohio River Valley Institute, August 22, 2023

By the first quarter of 2020, EQT Corporation, the nation’s largest domestic producer of natural gas, was supplying more than 4 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. Just a decade earlier, EQT’s output wasn’t even one-tenth as much and the company ranked an undistinguished 25th for output among US producers. But EQT had the good fortune and foresight to base all of its operations in Appalachia, which made it the greatest beneficiary of what turned out to be the world’s richest natural gas field. 

In those early days of 2010, when EQT was the scuffling little guy trying to find a place among giants, such as ExxonMobil, the company employed just 1,815 people. But, by 2020, when EQT’s production had surpassed that of ExxonMobil and all others, its employee count mushroomed to . . . 624.

Yes, EQT’s head count actually declined by nearly two-thirds between 2010 and 2020. In fairness, some of EQT’s job reduction was attributable to its spin-off of Equitrans Midstream (EQM) in 2018. But, even if you add EQM’s 2020 head count to EQT’s, combined employment at the two companies was only 1,395 in 2020, still a quarter smaller than EQT’s workforce in 2010.

EQT’s tale of skyrocketing output accompanied by a shrinking workforce helps us understand important things about the shale gas industry. It helps explain why, as the Ohio River Valley Institute documented in 2021, the Appalachian natural gas boom failed to deliver what had been expected to be hundreds of thousands of new jobs for the region. And it demonstrates that as the natural gas industry matures, it becomes less jobs-intensive and its already meager contributions to economic development and prosperity become even fewer. The dynamic is simple. As a larger share of output comes from existing wells and fewer new ones are dug and work is completed on the construction of processing plants and pipelines, fewer workers are needed. 

Consequently, if production stagnates and the only need for new wells is to replace those that retire, the economic value of the gas industry to Appalachia may diminish even further. And if the Energy Information Administration is correct in its most recent forecast for domestic natural gas production between now and 2050, that is exactly the scenario Appalachia and its natural gas industry are facing.

According to the EIA’s “Annual Energy Outlook 2023”, Appalachian natural gas production likely peaked in 2022. Although this year’s events may prove that forecast to be incorrect in the short term, the long-term trend is clear. Production is leveling off. Indeed, data show that Appalachian production began to plateau as early as 2019. And, as this report will show, economic outcomes in the 22 counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia that are responsible for 90% of Appalachian gas production deteriorated even further since 2019, which was the last year examined in ORVI’s original study of the Appalachian natural gas boom’s economic impacts in the counties where it is concentrated – an area christened “Frackalachia.”

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Kim Kelly, Union Jake and Adam Keller - The Valley Labor Report, August 16, 2023

Kim Kelly, labor journalist, author of "Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor," and friend-of-the-show, joins us to talk about another disease epidemic that no one's talking about that is hurting some of the country's hardest workers.

Read Kim Kelly's full report on how Silica is destroying the lives of coal miners and their families: here.

By Heidi Binko - Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, August 3, 2023

By staff - Appalachian Voices, August 3, 2023

By Claire Kovach, Stephen Herzenberg, Amanda Woodrum, and Ted Boettner - ReImagine Institute, Keystone Research Center, Ohio River Valley Institute, July 25, 2023

The Appalachian region has long suffered from not having enough good paying jobs. Even when the unemployment rate is low, too many Appalachians are disconnected from the workforce entirely due to a myriad of factors. The result has been a long-term structural unemployment problem that has persisted for decades, with too many Appalachian adults out of the workforce entirely and unable to secure a decent paying job where they live.

A federal job subsidy program that is targeted at breaking down barriers to employment – such as improving the skills and experience of potential workers to meet current employer demands in their local labor market – and connecting them with a job could not only boost incomes and improve the livelihood of thousands of Appalachians but also give people self-esteem, a source of identity, and feel more connected to their community.

This report examines the economic conditions of Appalachia with a particular focus on the Appalachian counties of four states—Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia—that comprise the footprint of ReImagine Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley Institute. This includes describing how Appalachia has been a “region apart” from the rest of America, including its history of resource extraction and exploitation, the collapse of the steel industry, and now coal, that has led to large employment losses in the area, and how the region’s uneven development has led to chronically low rates of employment, disenfranchisement from the labor market and even loss of hope underpinning the opioid epidemic from which the Appalachian region was particularly hard hit.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).