Fighting the Fossil Fuel Economy in Appalachia With the coal industry dying, public officials are promoting fracking and petrochemicals. Activists are working to demonstrate that the region’s real economic future is green. by Michael Sainato 10:48 AM

Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo

About 30 miles outside of Pittsburgh, along the Ohio River, lies one of the largest active construction projects in the United States. Dozens of cranes dominate the more-than-300-acre site, where hundreds of construction workers assemble a massive petrochemical facility set to convert natural gas into plastic pellets used to develop a range of products from plastic bottles to car parts.

The ethane cracker plant being developed in Monaca, Pennsylvania, by Royal Dutch Shell is one of at least five currently under construction or being planned throughout Appalachia’s Ohio River Valley, where the petrochemical industry is beginning to expand from its base along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast (grimly known as “ Cancer Alley ”).Thousands of fracking wells drilled throughout Pennsylvania and West Virginia since 2012 have driven growth in natural-gas production in the Appalachian region..

Pennsylvania state lawmakers offered Royal Dutch Shell nearly $1.7 billion in over a 25-year period to construct the plant in Pennsylvania, with job creation and economic opportunity as a driving argument in favor of its construction. Though the fracked-gas industry’s supporters have extolled the economic prosperity the plant is projected to bring to the region, signs are already showing those promises are falling far short. Many jobs aren’t going to locals and residents are left to suffer from the pollution created by these industries. A Green New Deal would provide the resources to develop sustainable economic infrastructure, from energy infrastructure to resources to develop and sustain clean manufacturing, without destroying the environment.

Despite the myth that the petrochemical industry creates jobs, the reality is quite different. The southwest region of Pennsylvania has continued to face a steady population decline throughout the fracked-gas boom. Republicans often credited the industry with providing over 200,000 jobs in the state, but in 2015, the state’s department of labor stated that roughly 160,000 of those jobs had been erroneously attributed to the industry. By contrast, there are currently more than 90,000 clean-energy jobs in Pennsylvania, growing at a rate five times faster than the state’s overall employment rate. Even so, the state’s incentives and goals for clean energy continue to lag far behind the rest of the U.S.

Building Shell’s Monaca cracker plant has brought around 6,000 temporary construction jobs to the region, though only an estimated 600 permanent jobs will be created once the plant goes into operation. Rather than using local steel, the project is utilizing imported steel, mostly from China.

What the plant will bring to the region is more carbon emissions. An estimated 1,000 active fracking wells are required to operate the plant at any given moment once production fully begins in the early 2020s. The annual carbon emissions from the plant would effectively eliminate the gains from carbon emissions reductions the city of Pittsburgh plans to make by 2030. The plant is little more than a last-ditch effort to squeeze profit out of an industry that is destined to become obsolete in favor of green, sustainable technologies.

The projected growth of plastic production is a significant global threat to meeting greenhouse gas emissions targets. In 2019 alone, the global production and incineration of plastics will produce 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases , equal to the emissions of 189 500-megawatt coal power plants. According to the EPA , 26.8 million tons of plastic wound up in U.S. landfills in 2017, of 35.4 million tons of plastic generated in the U.S. that year.

Corporations , local, state , and federal governments around the world have begun to enact bans on single-use plastics as plastic pollution continues to litter the world’s oceans, beaches, and drinking-water sources. Bans on fracking have also been enacted in New York, Vermont, Maryland, and Washington, and partial or outright bans in Ireland, France, Bulgaria, Germany, Scotland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Northern Ireland, and Wales.

In the midst of the fracking boom and the development of the Royal Dutch Shell ethane cracker plant, local residents in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, where the plant is being built, started an organization in March 2017 called Re-Imagine! Beaver County, aimed at developing alternative economic solutions for the region. A report published in early 2019 by the group outlined four economic sectors it concluded the county should promote, including energy innovation, green chemistry and manufacturing, sustainable agriculture, and riverfront recreation and tourism.

Joanne Martin, a co-founder of the group and resident of South Beaver Township, noted the importance of creating economic alternatives to fossil fuels rather than just focusing on opposing the industry on environmental grounds. The group is currently creating a local green-economy task force, and collaborating with different organizations throughout Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley to bring a Green New Deal business model to the region.

“Residents want jobs, they want to be able to pay their bills and bring food home,” said Martin. Providing labor markets with green, alternative economic solutions is the most important prerequisite to changing the culture and economic focus of these communities away from fossil fuels.

Younger generations are more receptive to the urgency of taking action on the climate crisis, and older generations have learned lessons from the boom-and-bust nature of extractive industries.

Western Pennsylvania was built on thriving steel and coal industries, and now petrochemicals is being pushed on the region as the solution to those industries’ disappearance and decline. Convincing residents to embrace a green economy, Martin continued, requires credible economic alternatives, to which end her organization is collaborating with tech, innovation, and regional partners in Ohio and West Virginia, rather than just focusing on environmentalist opposition to fracking at the plant.

“There is a network growing and building in strength here. Unfortunately we’re a decade behind the petrochemical industry,” Martin added. “There are people who still believe we can stop it, and people are growing in numbers with health and environmental concerns. There’s a lot of hard work ahead.”

In other parts of the Ohio River Valley, the buildout of ethane cracker plants isn’t as far along as it is in Monaca. In West Virginia, organizers are trying to mobilize sentiment to stop elected officials from pushing an $84 billion petrochemical development project fueled by investments from China.

The fossil fuel industry has all but defined West Virginia’s economy for over a century, with natural gas recently emerging as a replacement for a coal industry in steep decline . “We’re still struggling in West Virginia to understand the climate crisis is a national emergency and a problem that must be dealt with. That urgency just isn’t there yet. My fear is West Virginia will be one of the last carbon states standing while other states will be more toward 100 percent renewable energy,” said Ted Boettner, executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy , a nonpartisan policy research organization. “It’s going to take a vast amount of federal resources to get there. Appalachia needs a green public works program to join the 21st century. Until that happens the cycle of poverty and dependence on extractive industries will continue.”

Now, says Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, campaigns are emerging to educate residents about the climate crisis and against the economic arguments of the fossil fuel industry—“something that should’ve been worked on by our political leaders decades ago,” she says. “It’s a big challenge. We’re so accustomed to being the energy-producing state, and have come to accept those sacrifices that have to be made. Boil water advisories are what we have to live with.”

In 2014, 5,000 gallons of a coal-washing agent spilled into the Elk River, making the drinking water of 300,000 West Virginia residents in nine counties unusable for several days. Water contamination from coal and chemical industries has polluted drinking water throughout West Virginia and left many towns under boil water advisories for years in some cases. These cases are likely only to worsen with the expansion of natural gas and petrochemical development in the state.

She noted that younger generations are more receptive to the urgency of taking action on the climate crisis, and older generations have learned lessons from the boom-and-bust nature of extractive industries that increasingly are leaving workers behind as they go bankrupt, unable to pay miners’ pensions and black-lung benefits.

“There’s this emerging question of why are we a state so rich in natural resources but at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to median income, health indicators, educational attainment, addiction, and poverty,” Rosser said. “Why are we in such bad shape when these corporations have made billions of dollars from what’s under our feet?”

And without massive federal investment that a Green New Deal would provide, places like West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania , which provided the U.S. with energy resources for decades, will be left further behind.