Manufacturing chemicals here can help everybody
Steven Hedrick

  • “Shale gas development in the Mountain State could resurrect an industry that has provided high-paying jobs with excellent benefits to generations of West Virginians.”

Just five years ago, many chemical and energy experts believed that America would need to import a lot of expensive liquefied natural gas for domestic consumption.

But shale gas production has dramatically lowered the cost of our natural gas supplies – more than 30 percent last year alone – and more than doubled the size of North America’s natural gas resources.

West Virginia contains vast supplies of this underground wealth and has a big stake in the careful development of our Marcellus and Utica shale resources. If we develop these responsibly, as I expect we will, it will create real value to our economy in terms of jobs and economic growth.

And it will be a game changer for West Virginia’s chemical industry, which has been on a steady decline as jobs have gone to countries with lower natural gas prices.

Natural gas is the industry’s lifeblood – the building block for more than 96 percent of all manufactured goods.

These shale gas reserves also contain ethane, an essential petrochemical feedstock. Businesses that use ethane-based chemicals, like plastics, elastomers, performance fluids, and fibers, would benefit from this domestic raw material availability.

Research by the American Chemistry Council indicates that these companies stand to gain as many as 80,000 new jobs nationally.

So shale gas development in the Mountain State could resurrect an industry that has provided high-paying jobs with excellent benefits to generations of West Virginians.

It is my great desire to see this resurrection reflected in growth at the Institute Industrial Park. It would help stabilize a declining industry and foster strategic growth in the Kanawha Valley.

But as the heated debate shows, people have safety and environmental concerns about shale gas extraction.

Debate is healthy. Informed debate leads to smarter and better regulations and when strictly enforced, will allow the shale gas industry to proceed in a responsible way.

The debate also helps drive innovation that leads to industry best practices. Similarly, safety and environmental performance in the chemical industry has come under much scrutiny.

Hard work has led to continuous improvement in process safety all across the industry and, from an occupational safety standpoint, the chemical industry ranks among the safest industries.

Like shale gas extraction, chemical manufacturing must reflect occupational and process safety as well as environmental excellence.

Plant neighbors expect and deserve nothing less.

Informed and well-founded concerns must be addressed.

However, some believe that the natural gas required by society should appear without so much as a drilling platform, or that essential manufactured products can exist without chemical plants.

The rhetoric of these critics springs from emotion and fear, rather than the sound science which must guide our decisions.

The U.S. Department of Energy last summer convened an advisory panel charged with assessing environmental issues associated with shale gas extraction.

This panel included several key organizations, such as the Environmental Defense Fund, which worked together to come up with a long list of potential issues.

But, as reported recently in The New York Times, the panel concluded that “the U.S. shale gas resource has enormous potential to provide economic and environmental benefits for the country.”

Just in terms of changing the dynamics of domestic energy availability, shale gas development has more than proved its value. It’s not going away.

But an important question remains to be answered: Will it generate a new era of chemical manufacturing in our state and in our country?

I believe it will, and remain hopeful. Chemical manufacturing creates real value to:

  • the companies involved, to their suppliers and to their customers;
  • the people who will design and build the plant;
  • chemical plant employees, including operators, engineers, maintenance, and support personnel;
  • employees’ families, and to
  • their neighbors and community, as their jobs create additional employment in the area.

All of this is value that will cascade and spread widely throughout the region. That’s the real value and opportunity I see in the Marcellus and Utica shale.

It can happen here.

Hedrick is vice president and head of the Institute Industrial Park at Bayer CropScience.  The company’s website is www.BayerUS.com.

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