Governor goes to Ohio's booming gas fields for his State of the State address, touts new jobs

By Bill Reader, Ohio University
Partner, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues

Ohio Gov. John Kasich broke with tradition Tuesday by giving the annual State of the State address at a small-town high school in Appalachian Ohio rather than in the Columbus statehouse. Kasich spent a portion of his speech talking about the dominant issue in that region and a major plank in his administration's priorities — coal mining and natural gas exploration and drilling — just days after announcing a $500 million investment in the region's booming natural-gas industry.

"If we can create a national energy policy, we need an energy policy in Ohio," Kasich said in his speech. "We are the Saudia Arabia of coal. We need to clean it and burn it. We also need to be for renewable energy. We need to embrace renewable energy. We need to have energy conservation, and we need to use our natural gas through fracking. We can't degrade the environment at the same time we're developing this industry."

The first-term governor gave his speech in the auditorium of the Steubenville High School, on the Ohio River across from West Virginia's Northern Panhandle and near the Pennsylvania border. Steubenville has a population of fewer than 19,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The day before Kasich's speech, the Steubenville Herald Star reported that the governor had announced that Denver-based MarkWest planned to expand its processing plant in nearby Marshall County and to build new plants in the region.

The newspaper contacted the company to verify Kasich's claims: "A spokesman for MarkWest, who declined to give his name, said the company could not divulge the cost of the new plants. He also said the company is still working out the details for the exact locations for the Ohio facilities." The development could create hundreds of short-term construction jobs and more than 40 long-term jobs, a MarkWest official told the newspaper.

That region of Ohio has seen considerable activity related to the Marcellus and Utica shale gas exploration and drilling. Last week, the Herald Star reported that another related facility might be built in nearby Belmont County — an "ethane cracker" that would remove ethane from the "wet" natural gases in the shale deposits. A Kasich spokesman would only confirm to the newspaper that Royal Dutch Shell was considering building such a facility in Eastern Ohio. A local county commissioner told the newspaper that such a facility could create thousands of construction jobs and hundreds of long-term jobs.

Not all the news related to the oil-and-gas boom in Ohio has been about economic growth in the traditionally depressed region. Weeks earlier, D&L Energy held a news conference in Youngstown to discuss the company's oil-and-gas wastewater well near the city, which a Columbia University seismologist has said "almost certainly" caused as many as 11 small earthquakes in the region.

Ohio has about 170 such sites to dispose of the brine and fluids used in hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," of the shale deposits to release the oil and gas. A special report by The Columbus Dispatch states that "more than half of the brine coming to Ohio injection wells is from the shale-gas fields in Pennsylvania" and "The disposal industry is expected to grow as Ohio’s shale is exploited."