Scaling back or eliminating West Virginia’s tax subsidy for thin-seam coal production and redirecting these funds to a coal worker dislocation and revitalization fund could provide assistance to hundreds of West Virginian coal miners, ORVI Senior Researcher Ted Boettner writes. Since 1997, the Mountain State has offered a reduced severance tax rate for coal extracted from seams less than 45 inches. The vast majority of this thin-seam coal is metallurgical coal, the premium, high-carbon coking coal used in steel production. From 2016 to 2019, the value of West Virginia’s thin-seam severance tax reduction was between $30 and $57 million. Scaling back or eliminating this subsidy could open up funds for revitalizing coal communities.

While thermal (steam) coal production will continue to decline in the United States as corporations, utilities, and governments move to cleaner electricity production, met coal will likely continue to be produced until steel producers find cost-effective alternatives. Approximately 70 percent of global steel production relies on met coal. West Virginia is expected to produce about 35 million tons of met coal per year over the next ten years, averaging about $2.3 billion/year in total met coal production value. A 2.5% severance tax would yield approximately $56 million/year.

ORVI in the News

Thousands of Abandoned Ohio Oil and Gas Wells May Be Hidden. Drones Could Help Find Them. (Energy News Network)
Ohio authorities are looking to expand the use of drones to update the state’s inventory of abandoned oil and gas wells, Kathiann Kowalski writes. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources has currently identified about 1,000 orphan wells, some of which can emit climate-warming methane and contaminate local groundwater supplies. According to ORVI analysis of FracTracker estimates, there may be more than 158,000 abandoned oil and gas wells across the state. A comprehensive, federal well plugging program is needed to address the scale of the problem, Senior Research Ted Boettner asserts. Such a program could create the equivalent of 8,331 jobs over a 20-year period, and “plugging these wells and cleaning up the sites can also improve the public safety, health, air quality, property values and economic development in the region.” Comprehensive clean-up would likely be cost-effective due to the social costs of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as ecosystem benefits and likely job creation.

• [Sample post] Identifying and plugging Ohio’s 158,000 abandoned oil & gas wells could create up to 8,331 jobs over a 20-year period, according to a recent @O_R_V_I report. https://energynews.us/2021/05/10/thousands-of-abandoned-ohio-oil-and-gas-wells-may-be-hidden-drones-could-help-discover-them/

SB 119 Is a Dead End. Pennsylvania Needs Good Climate Policy. (National Resource Defense Council)
Pennsylvania Senate Bill 119 would raise barriers against carbon dioxide regulation and inhibit the state from participating in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). Mark Szybist details why Harrisburg should change course and abandon SB119’s political posturing and climate denial for clean energy and economic policies that will “actually help the workers and communities” affected by the transition from fossil fuels. Embracing RGGI would drive pollution reduction, job creation, and economic development across the state, Szybist asserts.

• [Sample post] PA should pivot away from SB119 and toward clean energy and economic policies like RGGI, Mark Szybist writes for @NRDC. It’s time to embrace the transition to a “more equitable, regenerative clean energy economy” outlined by @newdeal4us, @O_R_V_I, and more.

Opinion: Cleaning Up Abandoned Mines Can Help Environment, Create Jobs in Appalachia (Lexington Herald-Leader)
Abandoned mine lands are an “American infrastructure crisis,” writes Joseph Pizarchik, former Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), but “we can turn these liabilities into job creating opportunities with investment at the scale of the problem.” ORVI research shows that even moderate investments in abandoned mine land reclamation could create 13,000 jobs, stimulating impoverished local economies and alleviating communities of the environmental and public health hazards of coal waste.

• [Sample post] #AbandonedMineLands are an American infrastructure crisis, @JoePizarchik writes, but “we can turn these liabilities into jobs—13,000/year, per @O_R_V_I data—w/ investment at the scale of the problem.” https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article251037364.html

Aerial View of South Louisiana Oil Fields Offers Glimpse of Nationwide Orphaned Well Issue (DeSmog)
From above, the sheer ubiquity of South Louisiana’s derelict oil fields and abandoned wells demonstrates a problem that has become increasingly unavoidable in Louisiana, the Ohio Valley, and across the country. Methane leaks from the nation’s estimated 2 million abandoned oil and gas wells have been serially underestimated, and the resulting pollution has been largely unregulated under the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Act, Julie Dermansky writes. A slew of proposed legislation seeks to address the abandoned oil and gas well problem, but many of these bills would allocate funding to the state regulatory agencies that “allowed the orphan well problem to fester in the first place.” If the past is any indication, state-by-state programs would likely siphon federal funds to private contractors, creating few, temporary jobs. In a recent report on the on orphaned wells and abandoned mines in Appalachia, ORVI Senior Researcher Ted Boettner advocates instead for full-scale federal program to continuously monitor and remediate these abandoned well sites. The report points out that there “are an estimated 538,000 unplugged abandoned oil and gas wells in the Ohio River Valley states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky alone.” At the current rate of remediation, Boettner finds, it would take more than 900 years for states to fully plug all the known wells in the U.S. Drastic measures at the scale of the problem are necessary to limit public health problems and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

• [Sample post] At the current rate of remediation, it would take states 900 years to plug America’s 2 million abandoned oil and gas wells, @O_R_V_I data shows. @jsdart outlines the urgent need for a full-scale, federal remediation program for @DeSmogBlog: https://newrepublic.com/article/162077/another-reason-nationalize-big-oil.

Long Left to Struggle on its Own, West Side in Need of Transformational Change (Charleston Gazette-Mail)
For nearly five months, the Charleston City Council has been immobilized by debate over a bill aimed at curbing needle litter. Local residents are increasingly frustrated by elected leaders’ inaction toward the “syndemic,” the intertwining of COVID-19, HIV, hepatitis C, substance abuse, and gun violence, with with the city is dealing and which has been disproportionately borne by Black communities in Charleston’s West Side, writes Joe Severino. ORVI Senior Researcher Ted Boettner points to a supervised injection facility as a starting point for change. “The evidence is very clear that having a needle exchange program is good for the community as a whole, and it’s good for the people who are using drugs,” he said. “The conversation in Charleston is so political and emotional, an evidence-based approach to solve the HIV crisis — a direct result of the opioid epidemic — is nearly impossible to achieve. One real solution to fix needle litter and curb HIV and overdoses — a supervised injection facility — elicits only emotional reactions from city and county leaders.”

• [Sample post] Supervised injection facilities are real, evidence-based solutions to the opioid epidemic and the HIV crisis, according to @O_R_V_I Senior Researcher @BoettnerTed. https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/kanawha_valley/long-left-to-struggle-on-its-own-west-side-in-need-of-transformational-change/article_2bad7685-5372-570a-8242-12a7492831df.html

What We’re Reading at ORVI

Economic degrowth, climate change, and the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class top our reading lists this week.

• How Democrats Lost the Working Class (Niskanen Center) As Republicans embraced anti-elitism under Trump, Democrats reacted by embracing the values of the upper-middle class. The result, according to historian Matt Karp, is a party that often–intentionally or unintentionally– distances itself from the working class, which it used to champion. The professional class has made all opposition the “other,” embracing a partisan identity politics that says “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.”
  

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• Can the Biden Agenda Fix Middle America’s Deepest Problem? (New York Times) Mayors and others focused on the development of places that have experienced economic and demographic languishing see a distinct opportunity to use federal money to fix problems long in the making. “If you spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 10 years, it sounds like an awful lot of money,” said Steve Williams, the mayor of Huntington, W.Va., a city of 45,000 people—down from 50,000 in 2010. But after what he views as decades of underinvestment, and considering the potential long-term payoff, “it’s just a pittance,” he said. “We’re talking about investments that will last for 50 years and prove to be transformative to our communities,” Mayor Williams said. He is particularly enthusiastic about efforts to invest in highways, clean water infrastructure, and broadband in Huntington and across Appalachia.
  

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• Power Switch: Solar Is Heating Up in the Ohio Valley (WOUB Athens) Solar accounts for only a fraction of electric power in the Ohio Valley. The region remains a heavy user of coal to generate electricity. However, the rapidly changing economics of energy, combined with federal policies that favor carbon-free power could change the balance in the coming years. “I think providing a diversified energy portfolio is certainly an attractive item for companies that are looking to invest in a state,” said Del. Moore Capito, a Republican who co-sponsored a bill that enables solar power-purchasing agreements. Nationwide, solar accounts for 3% of electricity generation, but that is expected to grow dramatically in the years to come. In 2020, 43% of all new capacity added to the grid was solar, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group. The industry employs a workforce of 250,000, more than four times the number of coal workers nationwide.
  

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• Natural Gas Generation Is Lower Compared with a Year Ago (U.S. Energy Information Administration) In the first four months of 2021, natural gas-fired generation in the Lower 48 states averaged 3,394 gigawatthours (GWh) per day, a decline of nearly 7% compared with the same period a year ago. According to Senior Researcher Sean O’Leary, “even the modest increase in the price of gas (an average of $2.83 this year, exclusive of a brief, weather-induced bump) has dramatically shifted generation to coal and renewables, which suggests that gas prices are highly constrained and therefore unlikely to ever reach levels above $3/mmbtu, at which Appalachian fracking becomes truly profitable. The EIA report also suggests renewable resources will presently outcompete natural gas. Between now and the end of 2021, 29 GWs of new wind capacity will arrive, compared with only 3.8GWs of new gas. The gas decline will continue through the end of 2022.

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  TNC Announces Innovative Collaboration for Solar Development in Central Appalachia (Nature Conservancy) The Nature Conservancy has announced the development of some of the first utility-scale solar projects in the Central Appalachian coalfields, in partnership with Charlottesville, Virginia-based Sun Tribe, and Washington, D.C.-based Sol Systems. The solar systems will be built on former coal mines located within the Cumberland Forest Project—nearly 253,000 acres of land in Southwest Virginia, Eastern Tennessee, and Eastern Kentucky managed by TNC and owned by its Cumberland Forest, LP impact investment fund.

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  John Kerry Calls On Scientists to Lead Fight Against Climate Change Denial (Reuters) Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize laureate and professor of physics at Stanford University, said one huge task ahead was weaning global economic systems off continuous growth as their main aim, something incompatible with the Earth’s finite resources. “You have to design an economy based on no growth or even shrinking growth,” he said, arguing “prosperity” could be maintained even if that approach was adopted.

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