Appalachian Storage Hub: Realizing Our Potential

The West Virginia hills were once home to an abundance of mills, factories, chemical manufacturing plants and mines that employed thousands of hardworking Mountaineers. Today, the state’s economy is struggling to deal with the loss of businesses and population, the decline of the coal industry and the fight to maintain millennials, but West Virginia’s leaders aren’t giving up. As innovators continue to look for ways to revitalize the Mountain State, obtaining regional petrochemical cracking plants—or crackers—and creating an adequate resource to put West Virginia’s oil and natural gas industry back on the map are promising priorities.