2024 in Review – Ohio River Valley Institute

The close of 2024 marks another year of progress and growth for the Ohio River Valley Institute, completing our organization’s fourth calendar year of operation. This year, we added critical new capacity to our staff and expanded our breadth of our research and communications programs with the additions of Operations Manager Stacey Padilla, Senior Communications Strategist Virginia Alvino Young, Industrial Decarbonization Program Manager Justine Hackimer, and Research Fellows Mark Partridge and David Passmore. We published nine in-depth reports and research briefs demonstrating the false promise of industry schemes and illustrating pathways for economic development and energy transition that can help our region build shared prosperity, cleaner energy and manufacturing, and more equitable civic structures. Our twenty-four blog posts dive further into our broadening research agenda, and Research Associate Joe Cullen’s implementation digests on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act keep decisionmakers and the public abreast of critical opportunities to leverage federal funding for a cleaner, brighter future in Pennsylvania and throughout the region.

We’ve made quite a splash in the media, generating nearly 900 print, radio, and digital hits in outlets both local and international. Readership of our research eclipsed 4.9 billion, garnering a publicity value of $47.5 million, according to Critical Mention media analytics. Our website received 27,000 visitors and our social media content generated 98,000 impressions across Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Thank you for engaging with our work this year, and please keep reading to learn more about the Ohio River Valley Institute’s 2024 impact.

IMPACT: Partner organizations use well-researched claims to hold industry leaders and policymakers accountable for their decisions.

Policy decisions have sweeping impacts on the material circumstances and local economic conditions of folks across the country, from the Ohio River Valley to the Gulf South. For over a decade, policymakers have yoked economic development policy to the buildout of fossil fuels and the growing petrochemical industry, which had promised Appalachia an economic ‘renaissance’ complete with hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

This year, to hold to account policymakers for the economic gambles they made to incubate the petrochemical industry, we published several new reports that helped illustrate the opportunity costs of enormous investments in petrochemicals and so-called “chemical recycling,” both here in the Ohio River Valley and in the Gulf South’s petrochemical corridor known as “Cancer Alley.”

“Pennsylvania’s Bad Bet,” a report co-authored by Research Fellows Kathy Hipple and Anne Keller and Senior Researcher Nick Messenger, describes how Pennsylvania policymakers used a pair of faulty, industry-funded economic impact studies to justify billions of dollars worth of tax incentives for Shell’s multibillion-dollar ethane cracker in Beaver County. The massive petrochemicals complex in Monaca, PA was supposed to spur local economic growth, renewed business investment, and tens of thousands of jobs, according to industry executives and government officials. But over a year since launch and more than a decade since the project was first announced, Shell Polymers Monaca is still failing to generate local employment growth and economic prosperity and is unlikely to do so in the future.

This year, we also expanded our research lens beyond the borders of Appalachia to analyze a controversial tax incentive program fueling petrochemical development along the Gulf Coast. Louisiana’s Industrial Tax Incentive Program (ITEP) is a cornerstone of the state’s business-first economic development strategy, which aims to lure projects from large corporations with generous tax breaks. Since 1998, ITEP has disbursed more than $20 billion in taxpayer-funded incentives, a significant portion of which have laid the groundwork for petrochemical facilities and other major polluters in a region known as “Cancer Alley.” Yet these handouts have produced few returns for Louisiana residents and the state’s struggling economy, which has seen no new net job growth and continues to rank near-last in key metrics of equity and prosperity. Data show that new tax breaks for petrochemical development and other industrial facilities are a “losing proposition.”

Senior Researcher Nick Messenger’s ITEP analysis used actual jobs and income data to determine that the program’s exemptions have no statistically significant correlations with net job and income increases in the state. In fact, ITEP functions as little more than a subsidy that shuffles money around the state and provides a windfall for multinational companies who export most of their production value outside of Louisiana’s borders.

Along the Gulf Coast and in the Ohio River Valley, the petrochemical industry continues to evolve as fossil fuel majors scour markets for new means to keep production—and bottom lines—afloat. In July, a new report from Research Fellows Jacqueline Ebner, Irina Spector, and Kathy Hipple explored the unproven mechanics of the “chemical recycling” facilities taking root in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia and the market hurdles likely to inhibit their development. Their conclusion? Chemical recycling projects are highly hazardous and unlikely to generate local economic benefits or curtail global plastic pollution. Despite decades of research and investment, the chemical recycling process remains financially and technically risky due to a reliance on immature technologies and yet-to-emerge supply chains and infrastructure. Just ten pilot- and demonstration-stage chemical recycling facilities operate in the US, and none have achieved commercial success or produced at scale. Meanwhile, a global supply glut of low-cost “virgin” plastic, which could last for more than a decade, constricts the market for more expensive recycled plastics, hampering investment in new projects.

Holding the industry to account is critical to ensuring a brighter future for our communities. In October, Senior Researcher Ted Boettner presented at the 2nd Annual Orphan & Idle Wells Texas Conference on the need to secure a federal solution to the nation’s orphaned oil and gas well crisis that’s funded by industry rather than taxpayers. Cleaning up the nation’s millions of abandoned or soon-to-be-abandoned wells could cost $270 billion, but oil and gas operators hold just 1% of this amount in financial assurance. Boettner explains how a federal production fee and regulatory reform—modeled on the Abandoned Mine Land program—could help ensure these well sites are cleaned up on industry’s dime, creating thousands of good-paying jobs in struggling energy communities in the process.

IMPACT: Media ceases using industry talking points as fact, presses industry leaders and policymakers on the accuracy of their economic claims.

This year, ORVI research has proved critical to holding industry developers and their political allies to account, from the local level all the way to the national stage.

In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, fracking exploded in the zeitgeist as the national media landscape framed fracking as a do-or-die electoral issue in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania, painting state residents as broadly—if not monolithically—supportive of shale gas development.

ORVI’s rapid-response polling on Pennsylvanians’ attitudes toward fracking, an update to our 2021 survey of Pennsylvania voters, demonstrated that Pennsylvanians are actually much more critical of fracking development than presidential candidates and the media had led the national public to believe. In fact, nine in ten Pennsylvanians support stricter regulations on fracking, our research showed, and over four in ten support an outright ban on the practice.

High-profile coverage of our survey, including a FactCheck.org piece republished by the Washington Post and other major outlets, pushed back on prevailing narratives and shed light on the nuanced—and largely critical—views of Pennsylvanians on the ground.

Key research blogs corroborated Pennsylvanians’ overwhelming concerns about fracking infrastructure, particularly the proliferation of fracking waste and new gas pipeline projects. Federal waste loopholes have insulated fracking companies from accountability for the health harms of fracking waste transport and injection while boosting record profit extraction, Research Fellows Eric de Place and Julia Stone explain, saving companies an average of $60,000 per well. It’s little wonder that 94% of Pennsylvania voters favor disclosure of hazardous fracking chemicals and safer transportation of waste. In our region and beyond, opposition to the natural gas supply chain is mounting. Plans to expand the Project Maple pipeline in New England, which would drive even more extraction in Appalachia’s colossal gas reserves, have been met with community protests across four states, Research Fellows Eric de Place and Zane Gustafson write. Popular sentiment—and popular opposition—are driving home to leaders in industry and government that there’s little patience for fracking’s false economic promises and health and environmental harms.

The Appalachian hydrogen hub represents industry’s latest attempt to shoehorn more gas production with a sprawling infrastructural boondoggle. Senior Researcher Sean O’Leary’s report on ARCH2’s financial fragility has helped demonstrate to policymakers, investors, regulators, and the public how these plans are unraveling at the seams. Is The ARCH2 Hydrogen Hub Coming Apart? Sure Looks Like it. describes how high costs, uncertain demand, undercapitalized and inexperienced project developers, and uneconomic applications have caused a third of ARCH2’s originally proposed projects to drop out since the hub received $925 million in federal grants last October. The report made a splash in national energy publications and industry rags, prompting an evasive response from project backers at the Department of Energy and sharpening questions about the hub’s ultimate viability.

“ARCH2’s track record of scrapped projects and developer flight are glaring signs of risk for prospective investors, which is why, despite the federal largesse, the entire ARCH2 enterprise may ultimately amount to no more than a blip—albeit a very expensive one—on Appalachia’s economic and environmental landscape,” O’Leary explained to Canary Media.

IMPACT: Economic development authorities engage with sustainable development proposals for the region and minimize reliance on “the smokestack savior” mentality.

Since our founding in August 2020, ORVI has worked to develop and refine models for sustainable, people-centered economic development, analyzing how high-multiplier investments in clean energy and energy efficiency and a focus on infrastructure, social services, and quality of life can help grow shared prosperity across coal towns, shale plays, and in communities throughout the region.

The realization of the “Reducing Industrial Sector Emissions in Pennsylvania” (RISE PA) program represents a huge leap forward for our sustainable economic development goals. In Pennsylvania, the industrial sector has been a central economic driver for more than a century, producing critical goods, including steel, cement, and glass, that helped build and grow the modern U.S. economy. Today, manufacturing remains crucial to the state’s economy, contributing $113 billion to the state’s gross domestic product and providing 11% of the commonwealth’s jobs. The sector’s production also makes it the state’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, responsible for nearly a third of Pennsylvania’s CO2 emissions.

This July, ORVI and the broader Clean Power PA Coalition celebrated the EPA’s decision to award Pennsylvania $396 million in federal funding to implement RISE PA’s industrial decarbonization program. The program paves the way for Pennsylvania industry to slash up to 5.3 million metric tons of carbon pollution by 2030 while creating thousands of solid, family-sustaining union jobs that pay prevailing wages and prioritize local hires and apprenticeships. RISE PA will also focus on projects that improve the health of communities in close proximity to industrial pollution, which tend to suffer from increased rates of asthma, heart disease, and other illnesses.

The RISE PA program works by activating key decarbonization “levers” identified in our first-of-its-kind roadmap for industrial decarbonization in Pennsylvania, including transitioning away from fossil fuel generation, fast-tracking electrification, increasing energy efficiency, and leveraging material efficiency, fuel switching, and carbon capture technologies. These levers capitalize on established, market-ready technologies, including industrial heat pumps and thermal energy storage with significant co-benefits, that generate significant cost savings for manufacturers and drive “downstream” decarbonization by incentivizing a cleaner power grid. It’s a quadruple win—for the environment, Pennsylvania workers, frontline communities, and heavy industry itself.

Industrial Decarbonization Manager Justine Hackimer joined the ORVI team in September to help track and facilitate the success of RISE PA’s implementation. “Now is the time to focus on turning the promise and potential of RISE PA into actionable projects that will reinvigorate Pennsylvania’s industrial sector, ensuring it remains economically and environmentally sustainable in the future,” she explains.

Funding outlined by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act is setting the stage for clean energy growth and sustainable economic development throughout the region. This year, we’ve worked diligently to ensure federal funds are implemented in a way that maximizes emissions reductions, creates good-paying, union jobs, and prioritizes environmental justice and community benefits.

Local Implementation Coordinator Niani Brown has worked with partners to ensure communities and local governments are able to access the resources they need to leverage funding opportunities. Brown’s funding trackers and resource guides keep tabs on dozens of moving funds, eligibility requirements, and application deadlines. And Senior Research Fellow Joe Cullen’s regular implementation digests relay news and opportunities to community groups and decision-makers throughout Pennsylvania.

A report by Senior Researcher Ted Boettner and Research Fellow Greg Cumpton describes how a total of $1.3 billion in federal funding from the BIL and the Methane Emissions Reduction Program (MERP) across Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky can finance thousands of job-years to decommission the region’s estimated 816,000 total wells, which could significantly reduce the region’s methane emissions, improving public health outcomes and even increasing crop yields. New methane reduction regulations outlined by the US Environmental Protection Agency could spur the creation of up to 15,530 additional direct well-plugging jobs, the report shows. Procurement policies and prevailing wage requirements can help facilitate union access to well decommissioning project bids, improve the health, safety, and wellbeing of workers, and ensure taxpayers get the biggest bang for their buck with high-quality work.

With federal funding on the table, the pieces are in place to begin building a better, brighter future for Appalachia.

At the same time, we can’t afford to look backward. Efforts to construct a methane-based Appalachian hydrogen hub across Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia continue to build steam, threatening to prolong the region’s failing fracking economy, further ravage frontline communities, and cost ratepayers (or taxpayers) billions.

In the past year, ORVI’s hydrogen campaign, led by Hydrogen Program Director Tom Torres, supported by Community Outreach Coordinator Deirdre Lally, honed with critical new messaging strategy and capacity from Senior Communications Strategist Virginia Alvino Young and Communications Manager Ben Hunkler, and anchored by critical analysis from Senior Researcher Sean O’Leary, has continued to cultivate resolute region-wide opposition to the industry boondoggle.

The campaign’s efforts to oppose federal and state policies incentivizing blue hydrogen production and carbon capture and storage, increase awareness and build opposition against ARCH2 and related false solutions, and support a network of communities in Appalachia resisting pollution infrastructure at the local level have made regional and national headlines and palpably shaped development plans. Partners from more than 70 organizations have helped identify and broadcast the health risks, safety threats, and false climate and economic promises of blue hydrogen development while calling out an unacceptable lack of transparency and failure to meaningfully engage communities on the part of project developers.

This year, ORVI delivered a letter to the Department of Energy on behalf of 54 Appalachian organizations and community groups calling for the suspension of ARCH2, citing an extreme lack of transparency and meaningful community engagement during project negotiations. A pair of public “listening sessions” hosted this summer by project developers were flooded with concerns from more than fifty individuals regarding negative health impacts, climate harms, environmental injustice, and a lack of transparency and community engagement. We’ve raised public awareness of policies and incentives that could expedite blue hydrogen and carbon capture development and place communities in harm’s way, such as the federal 45Q tax credit for carbon sequestration, attempts to co-opt the federal 45V tax credit to support fossil fuels, and efforts to extend permitting authority over Class VI carbon injection wells to states in our region. And in November, outside of ARCH2’s “town hall” event in Dunbar, West Virginia—the first public, in-person engagement opportunity offered to concerned community members—the campaign supported a demonstration against ARCH2 that made regional and national headlines questioning the hub’s procedural and engagement failures and underscoring its threats to public health and safety.

IMPACT: Decision-makers have research and data to support community-based co-governance models, efforts to reduce industry influence in politics, and holistic disaster recovery efforts.

This year, the Black Appalachian Coalition’s “Your Health and Your Environment” lunch and learn series, co-hosted by ORVI, carved out a unique space for regional residents to build community power. The series of eleven webinars, along with BLAC’s policy summit and post-election debrief work, reached over 400 people from Appalachia and beyond with critical information on the health and environmental threats of plastics throughout the supply chain, from natural gas extraction to polymerization and petrochemical production to the plastic products on store shelves and in our homes. Critically, the series also provided participants with the resources and community support to build collective power, encouraging participants to mobilize friends and neighbors and advocate more equitable democratic structures.

Our team’s work to support community determination and development is already making concrete change in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. Hydrogen Program Director Tom Torres’ participation in the advisory board tasked with allocating funding from Shell’s $10 million penalty for serial air emissions violations helped seed 21 projects designed to benefit the environment, health, and quality of life of the Beaver County community. Funded projects include support for ongoing, real-time air and water quality monitoring; a full-time social worker in the public library system; and $500,000 to renovate the only 24-hour emergency shelter facility for women and children in Beaver County.

In southeast Kentucky, where residents are still rebuilding from the 2022 flood, a considerable gap—on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars—remains between the estimated $1.4 billion it will cost to rebuild homes in safer locations and the approximately $800 million in current or anticipated funds, according to Senior Researcher Eric Dixon’s analysis. Total rebuild costs have risen since Dixon’s original analysis, and implementation of recovery plans have been hampered by federal and state disaster policy that is too slow and too reliant on underresourced NGOs. But some non-profit housing developers and the Beshear Administration have gotten both serious and creative about finding a way to rebuild on higher ground, ensuring relocated residents are safer when the next flood hits.

In East Palestine, Ohio, where a Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic vinyl chloride derailed and was unnecessarily vented and burned in February 2023, impacted residents continue to fight for redress. A federal settlement reached this May totaled $310 million, including a $15 million civil penalty for violations of the Clean Water Act. The fine represents less than 3% of Norfolk Southern’s $527 million fourth quarter profit in 2023. As East Palestine residents continue to question if they’ll ever be able to return to their homes, former Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw took home $13.4 million in total compensation in 2023, AP reports.

Norfolk Southern agreed to a separate $600 million class action settlement with residents and businesses of East Palestine in April, ending all class action claims related to the derailment from residents within a 20-mile radius of the derailment site and covering personal injury claims for residents who live within ten miles of the derailment and opted in. The class action suit included no mention of any liability, fault, or wrongdoing, and neither settlement addressed the potential of long-term health problems.

IMPACT: Academics and other professionals have a vehicle to translate their research and other work into immediate action and uptake by members of the media, movement-building organizations, lawmakers, and other researchers.

This year, ORVI has broadened and deepened our partnerships with influential voices in academia, community and legal advocacy, policy analysis, and beyond.

Mark Partridge, one of the region’s preeminent experts on local economic development, has joined ORVI’s team as a Senior Research Fellow to help analyze the resounding community benefits of ”high-multiplier” investments in energy efficiency, weatherization, distributed generation, and education. Former Penn State University Distinguished Professor David Passmore also joined ORVI’s cadre of Research Fellows this year as an expert reviewer of our research on petrochemicals, hydrogen, and energy economics.

In the lead-up to this year’s presidential election, New York University Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies Colin Jerolmack collaborated with Senior Researcher Sean O’Leary on an influential Wall Street Journal op-ed explaining why fracking in Pennsylvania isn’t as popular as many might think. Politicians and press frame support for shale gas as essential to electoral success in the state, they write, but Pennsylvanians are split on fracking and concerned about pollution, polls show, and shale gas development has done little for the Commonwealth’s economy.

And Earthjustice Staff Attorney Claire Taigman helped flesh out our hydrogen and carbon capture “explainer” blog post series with critical information on the unique risks of—and regulatory gaps surrounding—CO2 pipelines.

IMPACT: Effective collaboration with unions seeking real, long-term opportunities for their members and have additional support for framing pro-labor policies as sound economic development for shared prosperity.

This year, ORVI research has continued to make the case that pro-labor policy is a win-win-win: good for workers, good for local economies, and, in many cases, good for the planet.

Case in point is Senior Researcher Ted Boettner’s report, IRA Clean Energy Credits with Labor Standards Can Boost Union Jobs and Economy in Appalachia, which explains how meeting prevailing wage and apprenticeship (PWA) requirements can more than double tax benefits for clean energy projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) at little additional cost, all while boosting productivity, strengthening workplace development, and spurring local economic growth. The 76 clean energy projects eligible for the PTC or ITC across Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia stand to create between 4,148 and 10,752 jobs and generate up to 6.2 million megawatt-hours of electricity annually, Boettner explains, enough to power roughly 580,000 homes for a year.

Across the region, implementation conversations on federal funding earmarked by the IRA and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have opened up new opportunities to uplift and secure robust labor requirements. In October, ORVI partnered with the Kentucky Laborers District Council, IUOE Local 181, Kentucky State Building and Construction Trades Council, ReImagine Appalachia, and BlueGreen Alliance to host an in-person workshop on federal wage requirements for public works projects in Kentucky. Officials with the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division provide training and tailored guidance for state agencies on the federal Davis-Bacon Act, which requires that contractors and subcontractors on public works projects supported by federal funds pay workers wage rates that are no less than rates that prevail in the geographic location of the project.

> IMPACT: We’ve created openings for informed community-led decision-making and region-wide adoption of a new theory of economic development that maximizes shared local prosperity.

As we set our sights on ORVI’s fifth year of operation, we’re grateful for the progress and partnerships we’ve made toward reimagining an Ohio River Valley empowered by shared prosperity, clean energy, and equitable democracy.

Thank you for reading, and see you next year!

Our 2024 staff (new additions in bold):

Joanne Kilgour, Executive Director
Ted Boettner, Senior Researcher
Sean O’Leary, Senior Researcher
Eric Dixon, Senior Researcher
Nick Messenger, Senior Researcher
Tom Torres, Hydrogen Program Director
Deirdre Lally, Community Outreach Coordinator
Niani Brown, BIL/IRA Local Implementation Coordinator
Virginia Alvino Young, Senior Communications Strategist
Justine Hackimer, Industrial Decarbonization Program Manager
Stacey Padilla, Operations Manager
Ben Hunkler, Communications Manager
Eric de Place, Research Fellow
Joe Cullen, IIJA/IRA Implementation Fellow
Kathy Hipple, Research Fellow
Anne Keller, Research Fellow
Mark Partridge, Research Fellow
David Passmore, Research Fellow

Our 2024 reports & research briefs:

Our 2024 research blog posts:

Our 2024 BIL/IRA Implementation Digests: