West Virginia Executive Spring/Summer 2020 | Page 37

Pennsylvania or West Virginia—finding 300-400 acres of flat property on the water that is out of the flood plain is not easy. These things take several hundred acres of land, and it needs to be flat land on a navigable water way like the Ohio or Monongahela rivers. West Virginia needs to find property and have it shovel ready or close to it so that if and when the third company or the third cracker is looking for a home, they will be looking in West Virginia.” This industry will also require a skilled workforce, so workforce development is key. “Since coal demand has declined, there are retraining opportunities for coal miners and people who work in the coal industry,” says Winberg. “We need to be able to train those people to work in these cracker plants and the service companies that will start up around these crackers to help with maintenance and so forth. Training those people will be something that the state can and should do. These are family-sustaining, generational jobs. In the next 50-60 years, it is not inconceivable to have three generations of the same family working at the Shell cracker and the PTT cracker, so training is important.” While the petrochemical industry has a strong foothold in the Gulf Coast region, Winberg is confident that Appalachia is a force to be reckoned with. “This is in Appalachia’s DNA,” he says. • American manufacturing relies on a steady source of petrochemicals to produce products such as plastics, paints, solvents and automotive parts. The U.S. chemical industry is a $528 billion enterprise (American Chemistry Council, 2019). It: Source: West Virginia Department of Energy WWW.WVEXECUTIVE.COM SPRING/SUMMER 2020 35