
SOMERSET, KY — Ever since I reported and completed a project to suggest a new development strategy for Owensboro, KY. — and met and married one of the city’s great and beautiful civic leaders –I’ve been fascinated by the evolution of the Ohio River Valley. See a ModeShift archive here.
Every economic era in American history opened along the river’s banks. Most of those that closed also weakened and died on a river that stretches 981 miles from its start in Pittsburgh to where it empties into the Mississippi in Cairo, Illinois. I’ve had in my head for eight years now a great non-fiction book on the Ohio’s contemporary story of reviving cities, cleaner shores, technological advancement, energy transition, and political retreat. A story, in other words, of America. Just one from a region of the country that attracts scant attention and invites limited perspective even from the more than 5 million people who live along its banks.
This week I’m off to the region around Pittsburgh, Morgantown, and Charleston to report for the New York Times and Energy News Network on the potentially colossal natural gas processing industry emerging on the banks of the upper Ohio. Royal Dutch Shell is building a $6 billion plant in Monaca, PA. to process natural gas liquids into feedstock compounds useful in the production of chemicals, plastics, and fuel.
Downstream, Ohio late last year approved air emissions and water discharge permits for a similar-size plant in Belmont County. The Department of Energy is considering a $1.9 billion loan guarantee to build a $3 billion gas storage and distribution hub in West Virginia. MarkWest, a big player in the industry, is spending $2 billion on gas processing facilities in the upper Ohio region. Billions more is being invested in pipelines to move gas and gas liquids to market. In 2017, during talks in Beijing between President Trump and Chinese Leader Xi Jinping, China indicated it was prepared to invest $83.7 billion in gas processing and distribution infrastructure in the upper Ohio states.
Continue reading “The Ohio River Again At Center of Seminal Industrial Transition”