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
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