The State Journal
(by Mychal S. Schulz)
In early August 2019, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) announced that oil and natural gas production in West Virginia reached record levels in 2018, the latest of 10 straight years of production increases.
Just a few weeks later, the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs for some of the largest companies in the United States, released a new Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation (“Statement”) signed by 181 of the association’s members.
How are these events related? And how, together, can they significantly shape the future of West Virginia?
By now, the natural gas within the Marcellus and Utica formations no longer represents a “potential” source of energy. That potential is being tapped, as represented by the announcement from the WVDEP that over 1.8 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) flowed from wells drilled in West Virginia in 2018, a 17% increase over the previous year.
The scramble on what to do with all that natural gas continues to play out throughout the region, from increasing the capacity to carry the gas away through the Mountain Valley and Atlantic Sunrise Pipelines, to the construction of a cracker facility in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, and (perhaps) Belmont County, Ohio, to the continued efforts to build large underground storage areas such as the Appalachian Storage Hub and the Mountaineer Storage Facility.
Each of those efforts, however, assumes something that is already happening — the production of a tremendous amount of natural gas beneath West Virginia’s surface.
Even a casual observer of West Virginia history sees parallels between this moment in time and the period when West Virginia produced coal that fueled American industrialization starting in the late 19th Century. …