This year, ORVI and our partners have worked to adapt and respond to an increasingly chaotic, uncertain environment. We’ve quantified stemmed funding flows for federal projects like old oil and gas well decommissioning, traced critical junctures in the storied history—and possibility—of Mon Valley steelmaking, and tracked the surge of new fossil fuel industry offshoots: gas-fired power plants for data centers, pipeline expansions and plans for LNG exports, and a groundswell of methane-derived ammonia projects, to name a few. We’ve analyzed tariff turbulence, followed a landmark unionization push in Kentucky, and revisited the economic trajectories of Beaver County, home to Shell’s troubled ethane cracker, and Frackalachia at large. We’ve helped communities navigate the mired landscapes surrounding federal hydrogen hub development; carbon capture, transportation, and storage infrastructure; and so-called “chemical recycling” facilities and related petrochemical derivatives. We’ve delved into communications research, launching responsive new message tests and rapid survey campaigns to better understand what drives our friends and neighbors in the Ohio River Valley. And, in the middle of it all, we’ve celebrated our organization’s fifth anniversary.
Even in the darkest of times, we’re grateful to have wins and accomplishments worth celebrating—milestones, partnerships, and commitments meaningful to our team and, hopefully, to our community. Thank you for your persistence and your support in 2025. We wish you a restful, peaceful end of the year, and we’re humbled and eager to start anew in 2026.
2025 by the numbers:
- 12 full-length research reports
- 38 research blogs
- 13 Clean Power digests
- 1,187 news clips, reaching an audience of over one billion
- $10.7M publicity value
- 36K website visitors
- 140.6K social media impressions
IMPACT: Partner organizations use well-researched claims to hold industry leaders and policymakers accountable for their decisions.
Our work has taken on new dimensions in 2025 to keep pace with the bottoming-out of critical federal programs and funding, the gutting of decarbonization initiatives, and the strong-armed acceleration of fossil fuel development in various guises. This year, our research has attempted to make sense of this new and shifting landscape, helping partners and communities overcome the prevailing headwinds and holding industry leaders and policymakers to account.
- Throughout the year, we’ve traced the economic—and human—impacts of state and federal program cuts and funding freezes, from electric vehicle charging infrastructure to abandoned mine land reclamation and orphaned well plugging. Research Fellow Joe Cullen’s regular Clean Power digests and the coordination efforts of Implementation Fellow Niani Brown have helped catalogued the devastating impacts to renewable energy projects and decarbonization efforts since the dismantling of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. And Senior Researcher Ted Boettner has analyzed the impacts of federal workforce layoffs on Ohio River Valley states, home to a combined 191,000 federal employees.
- Senior Researcher Nick Messenger’s report, “Tariffs in Appalachia,” described how the Trump administration’s slate of tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, first announced in February, have the potential to disrupt long-integrated global supply chains for key industries in the Ohio River Valley, spurring higher consumer prices and employment declines in the long run.
- Throughout the year, the way we communicate about our work and issue areas has taken on a new edge thanks to Senior Communications Strategist Virginia Alvino Young’s messaging and survey research. New access to digital message testing platform GrowProgress has enabled our communications arm to iterate and hone language in a matter of days, isolating the messages that resonate most with our base and those we try to influence. From the storied steel industry to emerging technologies like pyrolysis and data centers, we’re entering the new year with a richer understanding of what matters most to residents of the Ohio River Valley—and how to win over our neighbors as we work together to build a better, brighter future.
IMPACT: Media ceases using industry talking points as fact, presses industry leaders and policymakers on the accuracy of their economic claims.
The Trump administration has emboldened industry leaders and their allies in policy at all levels of government. Our efforts to fact-check and myth-bust industry claims redoubled in 2025, staving off an onslaught of boosterism for gas extraction, LNG, pyrolysis, carbon capture and storage, data centers, ammonia, and other tendrils of a fossil fuel industry that has become even more viciously opportunistic.
- In July, Senior Researcher Sean O’Leary published the latest iteration of his investigation into the economic performance of Appalachia’s fracking counties. “Frackalachia Update 2025” describes how the thirty largest gas-producing counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia have continued their economic spiral despite immense GDP growth, logging net losses of jobs and population since the dawn of the regional fracking boom. Meanwhile, data centers and LNG have replaced petrochemical and hydrogen development as the gas boom’s “shiny objects that are destined to disappoint,” O’Leary writes. ORVI’s ongoing economic analysis of Frackalachia continues to dismantle claims, such as those made by the Heritage Foundation in April, that investments in highly capital-intensive, non-labor-intensive sectors like gas extraction are capable of generating long-term job growth or local prosperity.
- Media scrutiny of Shell’s Beaver County ethane cracker and its impact on the surrounding community has only heightened since company officials indicated in August they may be looking to offload or split ownership of the facility. Research Fellows Eric de Place and Julia Stone have continued to illustrate the extent of Shell’s false promise to Beaver County, describing how the county has lost jobs and businesses and fallen behind its neighbors, the state of Pennsylvania, and the nation as a whole in nearly every indicator of economic wellbeing since Shell’s project announcement in 2012. “This was a terrible investment of taxpayer money,” de Place explains. And new research from Research Fellows Anne Keller and Kathy Hipple describes how Shell sold off tens of millions in tax credits designated for petrochemicals growth to out-of-state insurance firms, helping to pad its margins. The company is now reportedly looking to sell or find a partner for the facility, but it’s unlikely to recoup its $14 billion investment as polyethylene market headwinds intensify worldwide.
- Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel continues to make headlines, both regionally and nationally. Our updated report on the economic benefits of a transition to green steelmaking—and the job growth, emissions reductions, and relief of longstanding health burdens the Mon Valley stands to forfeit by staying course with traditional steelmaking—has helped steer coverage of the next chapter of Appalachian steelmaking. Industrial Decarbonization Program Manager Justine Hackimer, Senior Researcher Nick Messenger, and Research Fellows Kathy Hipple and Irina Spector explain that investments in low-carbon modernization upgrades and the construction of new green steelmaking capacity—potentially bankrolled by Nippon’s investment promises—could reverse course for the declining US steelmaking industry, creating safe, good-paying American jobs and seeding safer, healthier, and more prosperous communities across Pennsylvania and Indiana. But U.S. Steel’s investment plan suggests the company may instead be prioritizing new “DRI” steel plants in Arkansas, where union steelmaking is less prevalent, over modernizing its emissions-intensive—and historically union—traditional steel plants in the Mon Valley.
IMPACT: Economic development authorities engage with sustainable development proposals for the region and minimize reliance on “the smokestack savior” mentality.
2025 has seen a number of new “shiny objects” pitched to Appalachians:
- Power-hungry data centers exploded onto the national scene this year, generating more than 90% of the nation’s GDP growth and scores of headlines touting multibillion-dollar investment figures. But because data centers are highly capital-intensive and not very labor-intensive, they’re likely to become economic development duds with the potential to worsen income inequality and geographic differences in prosperity, Senior Researcher Sean O’Leary writes. Responding to soaring—and potentially overblown—projections of data center-driven load growth in the regional PJM utility grid with expanded natural gas generation could set the stage for double-digit hikes in electricity prices. It could also slow regional decarbonization efforts and drive pipeline expansions in Appalachia and beyond. O’Leary testified before the Kentucky Public Service Commission in June on the financial risk posed to LG&E and KU ratepayers by data center development, arguing that utilities have failed to adequately consider costs, risks, and alternative strategies, such as demand-side management and energy efficiency programs.
- At the beginning of the year, a surge of more than 37 proposed ammonia projects across the country, fueled by tax credits earmarked in the Inflation Reduction Act, promised to increase domestic ammonia production by up to 350%. But lingering questions around new markets and “nascent and dubious” technologies cast doubt on bullish demand growth forecasts, according to an industry-wide survey conducted by Research Fellows Zane Gustafson, Eric de Place, and Julia Stone. The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) in July has already clipped planned expansion of ammonia and hydrogen production significantly, with over 5.4 million metric tons of annual blue ammonia production capacity canceled or paused as of September. In Appalachia, the future remains uncertain for the Adams Fork Energy blue ammonia project, which would become the world’s largest ammonia producer if constructed.
- The number of so-called “chemical recycling” projects proposed in Appalachia has grown since the release of our industry landscape report in 2024. Community Outreach Coordinator Deirdre Lally’s work to track permits and project developments and liaison with communities and coalitions fighting pyrolysis and other forms of chemical recycling development has played a pivotal role in keeping these false solutions at bay. Communications research headed by Senior Communications Strategist Virginia Alvino Young has traced public perception of these projects and shaped the language groups use to describe them. And Senior Researcher Nick Messenger’s IMPLAN analysis of the employment and tax revenue impact of the Empire Diversified pyrolysis project in Follansbee, West Virginia has shaped the sentiment of community leaders and provided an important reference point for similar site fights throughout the region.
- The buildout of liquified natural gas exports has steamrolled ahead in 2025, emboldened by the Trump administration’s vow to expand gas production and exports across the board. Appalachian gas producers have capitalized on the promise of expanded pipeline access to LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast, signing long-term contracts to ship the region’s gas overseas. Research fellows Eric de Place and Julia Stone have traced the development of major pipeline projects that could increase the flow of Appalachian gas to the Midwest and Gulf Coast, including the Borealis pipeline in eastern Ohio and expansion projects along the Transco pipeline in Southern Virginia and North Carolina. In March, a panel discussion with Public Citizen Research Director Alan Zibel, Pennsylvania Utility Law Project Executive Director Elizabeth Marks, Research Fellow Eric de Place, and Senior Researcher Sean O’Leary examined the implications of expanded LNG exports, including prospective climate impacts, electricity rate hikes for American consumers, and outsized burdens on low-income households and households of color in Pennsylvania.
- The Appalachian hydrogen hub, once heralded as a region-wide economic savior, has suffered substantial blows in the chaotic upheaval of federal priorities. Hydrogen Program Director Tom Torres has navigated advocates and residents throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia through the roughshod rise and gradual fall of the hub and its ancillary infrastructure, tracking permits and project developments, coordinating regular update calls with dozens of participants, and pressing leaders and decision-makers with tough questions about the project’s future. Now, federal funding cuts are threatening the hub’s prospects, even as state policymakers push subsidies for hydrogen development.
The region’s continued reliance on the strategic triad of hydrogen, gas, and petrochemicals “augurs a future of economic stagnation combined with environmental degradation and continued loss of jobs and population,” Senior Researcher Sean O’Leary explained in March. As 2025 draws to a close, the region faces a crossroads—a doubling down on tried-and-failed fossil fuels, or a pivot to economic development strategies centered around infrastructure, energy efficiency and clean generation, and building a better quality of life for Appalachia’s residents.
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.
- In May, Research Fellow Dwayne Purvis and Senior Researcher Ted Boettner released a two-part report painting the most comprehensive picture to date of Appalachia’s spiraling unplugged well problem—and a pragmatic policy platform to ensure these wells are promptly and properly decommissioned. Liability for the region’s hundreds of thousands of conventional unplugged wells soars beyond available well-plugging funds by orders of magnitude, the report finds, and with unconventional well production starting to plateau, the window is closing to leverage a production fee on fracked gas. Research Fellow Zane Gustafson’s blog series breaks down the implications of the problem and the solution, and Boettner’s work with Research Fellow Aimee Mantell dials in on particular difficulties in Pennsylvania—ground zero for the abandoned well crisis—and its long history of operator non-compliance and lax regulatory enforcement. In June, Boettner expanded on these difficulties before the Pennsylvania House Environmental & Natural Resource Protection Committee.
- November saw the launch of the Appalachian Flood Resilience Coalition, a new group aiming to drive policy change and investment to bolster disaster response, support low-income households, improve flood mapping and data, and pursue nature-based hazard mitigation across the region. The coalition is founded upon the widely endorsed Flood Resilience in Appalachia policy platform released in May 2024 and reviewed by Senior Research Eric Dixon.
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.
- In March, Boettner joined Executive Director Joanne Kilgour and representatives from the Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation and the Unionville Chadds Ford School District for a press conference on frozen federal funding in Pennsylvania, describing how withheld funds “affect real people – their jobs, their education, their healthcare, their safety on the roads. When funding is delayed, people and communities suffer…political disputes shouldn’t hold our communities hostage,” Kilgour explained.
- In November, Hydrogen Program Director Tom Torres and experts from Fieldnotes and Buckeye Environmental Network revealed the oil & gas industry’s push to fast-track carbon capture and storage (CCS) development in Ohio. The joint webinar on House Bill 170 uncovered how gas industry lobbyists drafted and helped advance legislation that would allow carbon storage projects, like Tenaska’s Tri-State CCS Hub, to force landowners to accept carbon dioxide underneath their properties against their will through pore space pooling, would let CCS operators shift liability off their books and onto taxpayers, and would block municipalities from taking steps to protect local communities. The webinar was attended by over 170 concerned residents.
- In December, the Columbus Dispatch questioned the impact of tax incentives in Franklin County, Ohio, citing a series of analyses conducted by Research Fellow Mark Partridge and Senior Economist Nick Messenger. Foregone property tax revenue in the county spiked 143% between 2016 and 2023, exacerbating budget shortfalls for Columbus City Schools, their research shows; at the same time, incentives have failed to foster meaningful job creation. “With little empirical job creation evidence beyond self-reported commitment measurements, policymakers in Franklin County should seriously consider whether the costs of property tax incentives may now outweigh the purported benefits,” Partridge and Messenger explain.
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.
- In August, workers at the BlueOval SK electric vehicle battery plant in Glendale, Kentucky, touted as “the single-largest economic development investment in state history,” voted to unionize their plant. (Several dozen contested ballots remain under review by the National Labor Relations Board.) Throughout this year, Senior Researcher Eric Dixon chronicled and analyzed the obstacles overcome by unionizing workers, including a concerted campaign by BlueOval SK management to deter unionization efforts—delaying votes, hiring consultants and “union-avoidance” lawyers, running anti-union ads, and allegedly holding captive audience meetings and firing workers for union sympathies. As Dixon’s February op-ed in the Louisville Courier-Journal explained, unionization can supercharge the facility’s economic impact by helping ensure fair wages, safe working conditions, and a path toward shared prosperity for local communities. BlueOval SK’s short-sighted resistance to the plant’s unionization drive jeopardizes economic growth and the opportunity to “set a precedent on how to do things the right way by prioritizing the workers and communities who make it all possible,” he writes.
- In June, Dixon testified before the Siting Board of the Kentucky Public Service Commission (PSC) to urge regulators to prioritize local construction hiring, secure community benefits, and investigate flood risk associated with the proposed 210-MW Starfire solar project in Appalachian Kentucky. As Dixon pointed out, the nearby Martin County Solar Project mustered a local hire rate of just 11% without well-defined contract standards, a figure that developers admitted “fell flat” of promises made to the community. Though the Siting Board’s order ultimately failed to mandate local hiring provisions for the Starfire project, the body still has the power to prioritize local hiring and other tools that can help generate good-paying jobs in the building trades and lasting prosperity for the surrounding communities.
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.
Since ORVI’s founding five years ago, we’ve worked to till the soil for a new paradigm of economic development in the Ohio River Valley: one that centers families and quality of life rather than smokestack-chasing and corporate subsidies, one that retires a legacy of extraction in favor of collaboration, generation, and the pursuit of shared prosperity. We believe that the Ohio River Valley is a place where communities can thrive by investing in, rather than exploiting, local resources. This year, despite hurdles and setbacks, we’ve aimed to help our partners, policymakers, and neighbors clarify their vision of that better, brighter future. And we’re eager to carry our momentum forward into the year ahead.
Thank you for supporting our work in 2025. We’ll see you in January!