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What will our Ohio River look like in 10 years?
To see the future of the Ohio Valley, ORVI Research Fellow Eric de Place writes, look to a place that is almost its antipode: the tropical waters of Sri Lanka. Billions of tiny resin pellets, also known as nurdles, have flooded the country’s once-pristine beaches after a chemical fire capsized a cargo ship off the coast of Colombo.
The environmental disaster could preview the fate of the Ohio River Valley, where the Shell “cracker” plant in Beaver County, PA will soon churn out the same plastic pellets congesting Sri Lanka’s shores. Once produced, de Place notes, there’s no telling where nurdles might end up: each year, more than 10 trillion of the lentil-sized plastics enter the world’s rivers and oceans, making their way into the bellies of fish, birds, turtles, and even humans.
In more heartening news, a slew of legislation before the U.S. House and Senate would allocate billions of dollars to clean up the nation’s 61,728 hazardous, methane-spewing documented orphan oil and gas wells, including the 27,000 wells across Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The promising REGROW (Revive Economic Growth and Reclaim Orphan Wells) Act has bipartisan support and could support up to 50,000 jobs nationally, Senior Researcher Ted Boettner writes.
An influx of federal spending could similarly help address Appalachia’s abandoned mine land problem by hiring local reclamation workers, Research Fellow Eric Dixon asserts, but living wage requirements, project labor agreements, and a public reclamation jobs program within a Civilian Climate Corps are essential to ensuring mine reclamation work is well-paying, unionized, and accessible to those who need it most.
Meanwhile, Executive Director Joanne Kilgour outlines a path toward shared prosperity and Research Fellow Kathy Hipple points to an oil and gas industry managing its decline. On the ground, natural gas and coal extraction continue to fail our communities and stunt local economies. This week’s reads paint a stark picture of the front lines.
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The environmental damage of abandoned mine lands (AMLs) tends to be located in economically ravaged places. Although an infusion of federal dollars could create thousands of local reclamation jobs across Appalachian coal country, it will take strong labor provisions and a public jobs program to ensure the work is unionized, well-paying, and accessible to all, Research Fellow Eric Dixon writes.
Dixon recommends a $1.3 billion annual appropriation for AML cleanup, a sum nearly quintuple that of AML funding for FY2021. It’s ambitious, but money well spent, he argues. Impoverished coal regions stand to benefit enormously from a front-loaded reclamation program: a large-scale investment could support nearly 7,000 jobs per year for a decade.
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AML cleanup would also address hazardous methane leaks and other social costs to public safety, the economy, and the environment.
Many kinds of workers are necessary to clean up AMLs, from government engineers, scientists, and managers who design and administer AML reclamation, to machinery operators, clerical staff, and tree planters who execute reclamation construction. Median compensation for these jobs varies; in general, though, AML construction jobs pay above a poverty wage but below living wage standards.
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Why aren’t these wages higher? At present, federal Davis-Bacon prevailing wage regulations do not apply to AML contracts, nor does the $15 minimum wage required for all federal contractors. Instating living wage requirements could ensure that AML construction workers make enough to support themselves and their families. And union boosting policies like Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) for AML contracts and aggregating smaller AML projects from similar geographic areas into a larger contract could increase union density in the AML sector.
In AML-damaged communities, where poverty is 1.5 percentage points higher than the nation and disproportionately concentrated among people of color, women, and youth, many who stand to benefit from AML work don’t have the specialized skills or job experience to start tomorrow. A public reclamation jobs program within a revitalized Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) “could fill this key gap by providing on-the-job training and targeting groups left out by the private market,” Dixon writes, “and it would raise the bar for wages, safety, and reclamation techniques in rural construction markets.”
Read Dixon’s blueprint for well-paying, accessible AML jobs here.
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A submerged cargo ship off the shore of Colombo, Sri Lanka spilled billions of tiny plastic pellets into the ocean this month as an inextinguishable chemical fire ravaged the ship’s hull. The scourge of pollution from the “plastic snow” of resin pellets, or nurdles, has already devastated local marine life, standing to threaten Sri Lankan’s valuable tourism and fishing industries. Ghastly images of dead fish and plastic-ridden beaches could soon be the future of the Ohio River, ORVI Research Fellow Eric De Place warns.
The controversial Shell “cracker” plant under construction in Beaver County, Pennsylvania will soon produce billions of the same tiny plastic pellets currently suffocating Sri Lanka’s coast for use in plastic product manufacturing, from shopping bags to drinking straws to bubble wrap. And despite assurances from Shell, the site’s owner, there is not much evidence that the pellets will stay where they are supposed to.
Researchers estimate that approximately 230,000 tons of nurdles end up in the environment each year, accidentally spilled, intentionally dumped, or otherwise released by the plastics industry. Given that a single nurdle weighs only about 20 milligrams, this means that more than 10 trillion tiny plastic pellets are entering the world’s rivers and oceans every year. Citizen scientists have found nurdles in a depressing number of places: on beaches in Abu Dhabi, Ecuador, South Africa, and on and on.
Once the Beaver County plant starts up, it is quite likely that the Ohio River—including places far downstream from Beaver—will soon see another wave of pollution in the form of tiny plastic pellets. Whether they escape from Shell’s new facility or from river-going barges or rail cars or some other way, it is likely these nurdles will make their way into the bellies of wildlife and even up the food chain into the people who hunt and fish in the Ohio Valley.
Pollution risks aside, even industry proponents would struggle to make an economic case for the cracker. Lavished with the biggest taxpayer subsidy in Pennsylvania’s history, the giant facility has yet to attract even a single new manufacturing plant to the region, contrary to the promises of boosters. It has not proved a boon for the struggling fracking companies that will supply the site with the ethane needed to make the pellets. And it has not helped the region’s gas-rich counties, which have only fallen behind their neighbors economically during the era of fracking. Even in Beaver County itself where the project’s construction was supposed to bring a boom, employment actually declined.
The bill has not yet come due, but it will, de Place writes. And unfortunately, a portion of it will be paid by the Ohio River and its communities, where we will likely have to deal with a fate not unlike the coast of Sri Lanka.
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The bipartisan REGROW (Revive Economic Growth and Reclaim Orphaned Wells) Act of 2021, introduced to the U.S. Senate and House in April and June, respectively, would allocate $4.275 billion for orphan well cleanup on state and private lands, along with $400 million for public and tribal lands, and $32 million for related research, development, and implementation. The number of jobs created from the REGROW Act could range from 25,000 up to 50,000, ORVI Senior Researcher Ted Boettner writes.
The influx of federal funding seeks to address the approximately 61,728 documented orphan wells across the U.S. More than 27,000 of those, or about 44 percent, are concentrated in the Ohio River Valley states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
If the state portion of funding was based solely on the number of documented wells, the four states in the Ohio River Valley (PA, KY, WV, and PA) would receive about $1.9 billion over the next eight or more years. If the funding formula allocates 90 percent of the $4.275 billion based on documented orphan wells ($3.42 billion) and 10 percent on the share of jobs lost ($855 million), the four states would receive approximately $1.7 billion in state grants.
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The maps below show the geographical distribution of the documented orphan oil and gas wells in West Virginia. According to the latest well data from the WV Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) prepared by Downstream Strategies, there are approximately 4,577 documented orphan wells in West Virginia. The large majority of these wells are in the northwestern part of the state, where the current boom in shale drilling is taking place and where the first oil boom took place in the late 1800s.
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The funding provided by the REGROW Act or other federal well plugging policy proposals would likely provide West Virginia with enough funding to clean up and plug its current inventory of orphan wells. However, these documented wells likely represent just a small share of the abandoned and orphan wells in the state. Most of West Virginia’s orphan and abandoned wells are not documented in the state’s well database. One recent study estimates that West Virginia has over 440,000 unplugged abandoned wells, while another analysis finds that at least 75,000 abandoned wells exist based on current records.
The REGROW Act and other federal bills aiming to address the orphan wells crisis are a positive step toward addressing a portion of the country’s orphan well crisis, but more will have to be done to address the second wave of abandoned and active wells where states have been unable to adequately hold companies accountable for billions in clean up costs. A more robust federal program, that includes a production fee, will be needed to fully address the millions of wells and the tens of billions in clean-up costs across the nation.
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Joanne Kilgour: Together, We Can Choose a Different Future for Appalachian Communities (Pennsylvania Capital-Star)
What ORVI Executive Director Joanne Kilgour knows to be true about Appalachia is that “the depth of character, work ethic, and commitment to community here is unparalleled, and it is time to give back to a region that has given us all so much.” For generations, Appalachian coal and shale gas has powered the country at the expense of our environment, our health, and our resources. But together, we can move beyond an extractive economy to one of shared prosperity marked by lasting job growth, clean energy, and a stronger, more equitable economy. Reclaiming our region’s abandoned mine lands, plugging orphan oil and gas wells, improving infrastructure, and installing low-cost, reliable wind and solar facilities will drive job growth and local prosperity throughout Northern Appalachia, particularly with the help of federal investments and a comprehensive national policy agenda. Unplanned transition away from fossil fuels devastated coal communities across Appalachia. The time is ripe for an ambitious national transition program that supports the people and places hit hardest by the changing economy and improves quality of life for all. |
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| Here Are America’s Top Methane Emitters. Some Will Surprise You. (New York Times) The world’s largest oil and gas producers, like ConocoPhillips and BP, are selling off their most-polluting operations to small private companies in a bid to extend their social license to operate. The relatively unknown companies who purchase these high-polluting assets often manage to escape public scrutiny. The new Environmental Protection Agency analysis also shows how, as oil and gas giants start a long-awaited shift away from fossil fuels, they are shedding some of their most polluting assets to companies that provide almost no transparency into their operations. “You’ve got an industry that is, in a sense, managing its decline,” said Kathy Hipple, an ORVI Research Fellow and finance professor at Bard College. “It’s going to be ugly.” |
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Where Are the U.S.’s Natural Gas Pipelines? Often In Vulnerable Communities. (National Geographic)
A new paper coauthored by ORVI Advisory Council Member Martina Angela Caretta finds that the 320,000 miles of major natural gas pipelines crisscrossing the U.S. are disproportionately concentrated in counties considered particularly vulnerable by the CDC’s county-level Social Vulnerability Index, a measure of how resilient a community might be in response to a major disaster. The most vulnerable counties, the team found, had about two-thirds higher pipeline density on average than the least, hosting about 12.1 miles of pipeline for each 100 square miles. These major pipelines are larger and more pressurized than distribution lines, and consequently pose greater threats of air pollution, groundwater contamination, and explosions. |
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Opinion: Job Predictions Have Fallen Flat (Steubenville Herald-Star)
Despite promises of a production boom that would create 450,000 jobs across Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, the oil and gas industry has delivered “almost no sign of prosperity” to the Ohio River Valley, John Rucki of Amsterdam, Ohio writes. The jobs “didn’t materialize,” and instead “all we got was increased heavy truck traffic and damaged roads…on top of the damage done to surface waters and aquifers.” Rucki cites a recent ORVI report on the decade-long failure of shale gas production in the Marcellus and Utica fields to deliver local growth in jobs, income, and population. In Ohio’s seven major gas-producing counties—Belmont, Carroll, Guernsey, Harrison, Jefferson, Monroe and Noble—there was a net job loss of more than 8 percent from 2008 to 2019, Rucki notes. |
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| Appalachian Officials Urge Replenishment of Mine Cleanup Fund (Pittsburgh Business Times) Experts and policymakers in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, including West Virginia Governor Jim Justice and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, are petitioning for more funding for abandoned mine land (AML) cleanup in Appalachia. Unless Congress replenishes funds or passes legislation enabling large-scale spending through the Biden administration’s infrastructure plan, federal AML funding is likely to run out at the end of September. According to recent ORVI estimates, the environmental and fiscal cost of cleaning up abandoned mines and oil and gas wells is between $12 billion and $26 billion nationwide. |
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What We’re Reading at ORVI
Natural gas and coal extraction are failing our communities and stunting our economies. This week’s reads paint a stark picture of the front lines:
- America Is Building Mountains of Radioactive Fracking Waste & the One in Joe Biden’s Hometown is Under Criminal Investigation (Public Herald) In the heart of President Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, non-profit community group is fighting the massive expansion of Keystone Sanitary Landfill, a waste dump that accepts radioactive material created by fracking for oil and natural gas. Keystone has a dirty history of contaminating groundwater, alleged illegal dumping, and other faulty operations that have led to federal investigation and litigation. The latest is its trouble with landfill leachate, the contaminated liquid that leaches out of landfill debris after rainfall. Despite 224 logged citizen complaints about the facility’s violations since 1987, not one has resulted in a violation enforcement or penalty from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
- Biden Vows to Support Struggling Appalachian Communities. But Residents Are Wary of Failed Promises. (Southerly) For 40 years, the question has cast a shadow over the hills of Appalachia: what happens to coal country and the people who live in it when all the coal is gone? Today, it’s a story playing out all over central Appalachia, as Kentucky coal production declined by two-thirds from 2011 to 2019, West Virginia coal production fell 31%, and Virginia fell 48%. And as coal mines have disappeared, population falls and poverty rates rise. Without more substantial federal support or a clear plan, the long-term outlook for coal communities is hazy. Skeptical of Biden’s widely touted infrastructure plan, residents and local officials are struggling, helping each other survive through a patchwork system of mutual aid networks, fundraisers, and small grant programs, left wondering why nobody saw these problems coming sooner.
- Study Shows Rural Pennsylvania School Districts Not Benefiting from Nearby Fracking (Pittsburgh City Paper) Proponents of the oil and gas industry often claim the economic growth and jobs, that come with fracking development is too good for rural communities to pass up, even if health and environmental problems follow. But a February study exploring school district revenues in areas that were home to drilling rigs between 2007 and 2015 suggests that “districts experiencing unconventional drilling had lower per-pupil revenues, locally raised per-pupil funding for schools, per-pupil income, and per-public property wealth than very similar districts that did not experience unconventional drilling.” The study could suggest a phenomenon where fracking is actually contributing to a wealth transfer from rural to suburban school districts, possibly because those earning wealth in the fracking industry aren’t living in the rural communities that are experiencing the majority of the drilling, Ryan Deto writes.
- Opinion: Clairton Is Dead, Long Live Clairton (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) U.S. Steel’s efforts to keep open the Clairton Works, along with it’s codependent Edgar Thomson and Irvin Works, is “the last battle of an economic war long lost— predetermined by economic forces that long ago eviscerated Pittsburgh’s geographic competitiveness as the nation’s center for steel production,” writes Christopher Briem, a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research. “However long the remaining parts of the regional steel industry continue to operate, communities in Clairton, Braddock and the remaining mill towns of the Mon Valley need to finally plan for the inevitable future without heavy industry and finding strategies to build new paths forward to rebuild economic prosperity.”
- Albany Just Blew It on Climate, Again (New York Focus) The 2021 New York State legislative session concluded this week with a whimper, Pete Sikora writes. For another year, legislators slinked out of Albany after failing to take climate action. They didn’t pass desperately-needed legislation to stop carbon pollution. They failed to put money or enforcement power behind existing on-paper commitments to reduce emissions, or invest in climate action in disadvantaged communities. In fact, the state may have gone backwards: the legislature confirmed the governor’s polluter-supported nominees to the Public Service Commission, the state utilities regulator. The answer? New York State needs more unabashed, no-holds-barred activism to hold Albany and all it represents accountable—and fast.
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