The Community, Connections & Commerce Podcast, presented by OUE & St. Clairsville Chamber - Community, Connections, & Commerce Episode 19 feat. Shale Cresent Pt. 1

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Hi everyone, this is Wendy Anderson and I'm sitting in for Drake, who is in school as we speak. And I am joined by Sam from the Bloom Daddy Experience. Thank you so much, Sam. I'm the pinch hitter today. You're the pinch hitter today. We are so excited because I'm excited to welcome Greg Gassara. Greg Gassara from Shell Crescent. USA.

USA. Welcome, and thank you for coming. It's good to be here. I just love, it's good to get back up here to Wheeling, but to see what's happening here. A lot of people, if you live here, it's kind of like your kids growing up. Sure. You don't notice, and we stayed at Ogilby last night.

Awesome, huh? What they've done to that place is awesome, off the charts. It is. It's beautiful. And when you first drive in, that says, what, Ogilby Park? And it's got the lights and the water.

And the water flowing. No, they've done some great stuff with that hotel. And that's the kind of thing that as we bring foreign industry here, that's the kind of place that they need to see. Okay, so Greg, let's start it off. What is Shell Crescent USA? Shell Crescent, we're a nonprofit, nongovernment, economic development, marketing, and research organization long story short what it means is

our whole mission is we're privately funded is to create jobs in this region we call the shale crescent region west virginia ohio and pennsylvania those three states we were formed in 2016 i joined in fall of that year. And what had happened, a group of community and business leaders in the Parkersburg Marietta area looked at what was going on and they realized that, wow, we've got abundant natural gas. We've got a great workforce. We've got the Ohio River and other waterways. And we're in the middle of one of the largest of half the U.S. population. So we're in the middle of a huge area of customers, potential customers,

and nobody knew. And so they brought me on. My background is 40-plus years in the oil and gas industry. A lot of that was as an engineer, but eventually I did a lot of sales and marketing and so we were in a meeting and jerry jameson we need to talk and as my wife linda said you are consumed with shellcrashing because it it is it's exciting because, and particularly now because we're at the point that we actually get to see and meet the jobs we've helped to create. Because what we do, our real mission is to create jobs and raise the standard of living for everybody here in the region.

But how we do that, we use our marketing, our research, and one of of the things we do a lot of high dollar studies and one one of the first ones we did was looking at building a cracker plant here versus the gulf coast okay and we thought we might have an advantage we did that that was in 2017 first one we did we did it with ihs market. Their VP calls me in October that year. He said, we thought you might have a slight advantage over the Gulf Coast. We didn't realize it would be this big. Oh. It was a big enough deal that we were able to get on the main stage, the World Petrochemical Conference in March of 2018 that a group from this

region hadn't been on there I don't know I guess forever and our study was presented as part of a panel Montaner storage was there we had shell was part of the panel when era and and then we had a gentleman from IHS that did the presentation, and then with Bechtel, their VP was part of that. Okay. And when they asked Hillary Mercer from Shell, the senior VP, why did you come to Pittsburgh? And she pointed straight at Tony Palmer, who presented our study,

and she said, for every reason he just told you. And the whole mission is what's changed is we've got this abundant natural gas. We've got the natural gas liquids that are raw materials. What we had been doing since about 2010 is shipping all that to the Gulf Coast. Their crackers down there turn it into a little pellet. But what we didn't know is 70% of the people that use those pellets that make cell phone cases and fabric and plastic bottles and my wife's knee cartilage, people that make all that stuff, all the medical equipment, they're making it up here. So the pellets go to the Gulf Coast and then they ship them back because 70% of the polyethylene and polypropylene demand is here.

Right. And all that Shell did is they built literally on top of their energy and feedstock and in the middle of their customers. When you do that, you massively, you eliminate millions of dollars in transportation, not just to get their product, but to ship that end product. And the customers in the plastics industry, to be able to buy it. And right now, today, in Follensbee, we've got Just Right. They used to be Eagle Manufacturing. Oh, okay. Eagle Just Right, all that stuff.

Well, they're buying their pellets from Shell. 60 miles away. Before Shell was there, they had to get them from the Gulf Coast. Using our natural gas was making these pellets on the Gulf Coast. And they're having to buy them and ship them up here. Now look how much money they're saving. Right. And they can turn that savings over to the customers.

Exactly. Yeah. And the other thing they save money on is they don't have to store all this stuff. Because we all know that what's the Gulf Coast have? They have hurricanes. When there's a hurricane, everything shuts down. And for like a just right or an eagle to keep going, they have to have storage. Well, if you know that in shells, I've seen them, they have to have storage. Well, if you know, and Shell's, I've seen them since they've been in operation,

and they live by this mantra, you call us Monday, we will have you product by Friday. If you order that same product from the Gulf Coast, it's 30 to 45 days by rail. Can you imagine the change from a business standpoint? If you're a small business owner, can you imagine the savings? And those savings are creating jobs because now

what we've all learned for anybody in business, back in my oil field days, I knew if I wanted to grow revenue, the fastest way was to go into an existing customer and help them to buy more of what we do. Sure. Well, can you imagine the same thing happens here? If we want to create jobs fast, and we've helped, we as Shell Crescent helped to do this, a local company can add a line or add a machine in a matter of months.

It takes years to build a factory. And we're seeing a good friend of mine in Ravenswood. We got to talk to him and explain all the stuff, the reasons why he can expand. And we're at the business summit a couple years ago. And he comes up to me. He says, we're adding three lines. I said, what does that mean? He says, I've got to hire engineers.

I've got to hire people. And that's the change is a local company can grow very quickly. You can add a shift. You can add one piece of equipment and expand in a matter of months and create the jobs that we're looking for. So that's what we do. We're job creators, and it's fun because we're seeing local companies expand. And sometimes people say, well, where are these jobs?

We don't see them. Talking to Buddy Malone, he's head of the Parkersburg Marietta Building Trades Council. That's the electricians, all those skill trades, carpenters, millwrights, the whole thing. And when we started talking in 17 and 18, a lot of his people were working up at Shell. And he said, Greg, I want my members to be able to sleep in their own beds. And they're doing that now. Because local plants up and down the Ohio River are expanding.

They're not the ones that are going to put in the Wheeling or St. Clairsville paper. They're not going to put a headline that we're going to, because they're not going to tell their competitors. Right. Sure. But they're very quietly expanding their lines. Okay. There's one company, I can share this with you. We were at a meeting in Charleston a couple months ago.

And I asked the first question. Big plant down at Parkersburg. Everybody knows about it. And I said, are you considering moving production from Europe? Because Europe can't get energy. They can't get raw materials. Their production in Europe is about half

of what it used to be. And I said, are you considering moving production from Europe to the Parkersburg area? And he just smiled. He said, I really can't tell you about that. But he said, I can tell you this. The sister plant to the Parkersburg plant is in Amsterdam. And that's all he said. That's all he needed to say. So that's all he said that's all he needed to say so that's the stuff so what what buddy told

me he said greg he said all of my members are sleeping in their own beds they're working here in the area and his big challenge now isn't finding jobs for his people. It's finding people for the jobs. And that's a big deal. And that's something that I think you as part of the chamber up here. That's what we work on. We've got to get that message out to the young people in particular that doggone it, if you want to go to college, great. But you don't have to go.

And these aren't grandpa's manufacturing jobs where you've got to be sweaty and buff and whatever. These are high-tech jobs. These are jobs that are computer-oriented jobs. These are the kind of jobs that are skilled jobs that you need training for. Right. But I taught two years at Pierpont before I got so busy with shellcrest and I couldn't. And my students, I did a leadership course.

I got them second year. They were already, all of them, 100% had job offers, making $50,000 to $60,000 to start. And that's a two-year degree. Not that different from Belmont or West Virginia Northern. Can you imagine making $50,000 to $60,000 a year, two-year degree, and it cost them $15,000 if they paid, if they didn't get a scholarship. or West Virginia Northern. Can you imagine making 50 to 60 grand a year, two-year degree, and it cost them 15 grand if they didn't get a scholarship.

And then, now here's the fun thing. I asked these students, I said, well, you're all working, you're all doing okay. I said, what are you going to do when you more than double your salaries, your income? What do you think the first thing you're going to buy is? A car. This is? Car. This is West Virginia.

House. Pickup truck. I was going to say four-wheeler. Four-wheeler. That's it. Pickup truck. Well, that's like $50,000 right there. But Wendy, you're right.

The second one is a house. Yeah. And the third one I didn't think about because we're in Fairmont. WVU Mountaineer season football tickets. So can you see when you start creating these manufacturing jobs. We've got a friend, our doctor's son

lives in Fairmont. He graduated from that program. He got the house. He got the pickup truck. He's got was it three kids now? Three kids now. That's three more West Virginians. And guess truck. He's got, was it three kids now? Three kids now. Okay. That's three more West Virginians.

Yes. And guess what? He's buying, they're buying baby beds. Right. But can you see what that does to the local economy? Sure, they're supporting that. And somebody had to build a house. Oh, yeah.

And so all those things, that's why bringing manufacturing back here is so powerful. It is. Well, Greg, just real quick, you spoke about the manufacturing of the past. Do we not still have in the tri-state region a lot of the base infrastructure, the Ohio River Valley, the Ohio River, the rail system, the trucking system? It's all still here. It's just not utilized to the potential it could, correct? Sam, the trucking system, it's all still here. It's just not utilized to the potential it could, correct? Sam, you just nailed it. That's

exactly what we have. And that's Shell Crescent's mission is to tell the world that we have exactly what you talked about. We have the Ohio River. And we had a company from Italy here week before last. They were enamored at the size of the Ohio River and watching these barges go up and down.

So unless they come, unless we tell them we've got the Ohio River, we've got a great workforce still. We're in the middle of half the U.S. population, which is not just plastics, but you name it, everything else. So you've got all that, and we have what the world doesn't have. half the U.S. population, which is not just plastics, but you name it, everything else. So you get all that. And we have what the world doesn't have, is energy. We got a lot of coal, but now today with the movement towards clean power, if this region, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, if we were our own country, we would be the number three natural gas producing country in the world. The only places on planet Earth that produce more natural gas are the rest of the U.S. without our region.

That's U.S. number one. Russia, number two. We're number three. We produce twice as much natural gas here, just these three states, as the entire country of China. So we actually did a study with Jobs Ohio comparing manufacturing costs in China versus Cambridge. Okay. All right. Guess what?

We win. We win hands down. It's not even close. Right. And then that's not even counting the environmental benefits. If you care about the planet, what I tell folks, you want to do something good for the planet, buy American. Buy here because you know that it's made under U.S. environmental law. It's made with our raw

materials. And you're buying it, I mean, you're literally talking about a few hundred miles in transportation versus a Chinese product made with Middle East oil shipped here. We looked at the number. It's over 20,000 miles of transportation. And we know that they don't have the environmental controls that we have. So why don't even think about looking yourself in the mirror and seeing what a great job you're doing if you're buying Chinese products thinking you've helped the planet. You're not. Right. So we need to, the potential growth for the industry is exponential. It is. It absolutely is. And we're seeing Jobs Ohio has done a phenomenal job. Pennsylvania's done a great job. West Virginia, I was talking to, I coach high school soccer in the Charleston area, but the gentleman that does the marketing and PR for the state.

Okay. I said, when's the last time we've seen this kind of growth in West Virginia? And he said, Greg, he said, the last time we had this much infrastructure growth and economic development was in the 1920s. It's been 100 years since we've seen this kind of growth in West Virginia. Because think about it. When's the last time you've seen? We watched all these factories implode.

Oh, sure. And the reason they did is we lost our energy advantage. The reason, where I live in Elk View, we're 10 miles from Glendon, where the first cracker on planet Earth was built by Union Carbide in 1921. They built it there because we had, it was water, the Elk River, but they had natural gas and they had oil, all the raw material they needed to make polyethylene plastic, to make those kind of products. So

during World War II, we were, as a matter of fact, during the Cold War, I had friends at WU told me that we were on Russia's hit list because of all the chemical plants in the Kanawha Valley, in the Ohio Valley. So when those, when the energy went away, so did the jobs, first to the Gulf Coast and ultimately to China, to Asia.

That's changed. And when we were just, Lyndon and myself and Nathan, our president, Nathan Nord, our president, were in Germany. We did a single-day event in March. And we had 27 different companies that came to this. We worked with the U.S. commercial services and they told us privately. They, if you think about when you, I didn't know where the coal was mined in Germany. They don't know where our gas is. And we talked to them after we had a kind of a mixer session. And they said, we are so screwed. We knew that America had energy. What we didn't know is the energy is where the

people in the manufacturing are. And their message to us was, how the hell do we compete with that? And how do they compete? They don't. They don't. There's a company, Stockmar Urethanes. They're located in Clarksburg. They were, thanks to Angela, they were on our panel, and they were explaining why they came to West Virginia.

It's been 15 years ago. And then their CEO told me after the event, he said, we're trying to make more of the same product in Germany that we made here for 30 years. We can't get the permits to do it. Guess where they're going to make it? They're going to make it in Clarksburg now. They're going to expand Clarksburg because they can't get a permit in Germany, but their raw materials are here.

They've got a workforce that's already here. They've already put continuous property to their Clarksburg location. They're bringing in a rail siding. So they're going to expand in West Virginia where they couldn't do it in Germany. What's that mean for us as West Virginians? Jobs. What's it mean for the region? Because any time you see an expansion,

whether it's in West Virginia or Pennsylvania, it kind of raises all ships. Yeah. Because, you know, whether you live in St. Clairsville or Wheeling, you've got a car, you're going to go where you're going to go. You're going to go wherever the jobs are. Oh, my gosh. So this is really an exciting time.

We're talking to companies from just this morning. Right. One of the companies we're working with in India that wants to come here later this month or early October reached out. We've got a company from Romania that's ready to come. We're looking at companies from Turkey. So throughout literally the world is looking at this region because we have something they don't have. We got abundant economic energy. Our natural gas is about $1.82 in MCF.

That same product, identical product in India is $15.50. In Europe, it's $14.50. Now, if you use that as a raw material, where should you be? The guy from India, he came up to our booth. And by the way, just so you know how big a deal this is, we've gone to a number of other events. We were at SelectUSA. It's an event put on. The Commerce Department does a phenomenal job in Washington, D.C.

And they work hard for a year to bring foreign investment to the United States. And all the states are there, all 50 states. Shell Crescent had a booth. They opened the doors at 11 o'clock on Monday. I was there. Nathan, our president, was there. We had another gentleman from Ohio there. Linda was the, my wife was a facilitator. And we were swamped. I've done trade shows for over 40 years. Never saw anyone, I guess. I had two people talking to them. Everybody had someone they were

talking to, someone waiting for them. Linda comes up to me and she said, see that guy over there? He said he was here last year. He said, he's not leaving until he sees you. I mean, Nevada's across the aisle from us. They're sitting there twiddling their thumbs trying to figure out what's going on. What's going on? And when they come, the people that came to our booth were manufacturers. They didn't just come to talk. They came with plans.

They said, company from Poland says, we've got 250 jobs. 50 of them are white-collar. The other 190 are blue-collar. Here's what we're going to make. Here's how much acreage we need. And so what we do, we physically take them to Ohio. We physically take them to the West Virginia booth in Pennsylvania and introduce them. And then the states can work their magic.

But our goal at Shell Crescent is to convince these companies. And it's not that hard. It's almost like selling water to a guy that's on fire. But they come to our booth, and our mission is to tell them that here's why you want to be in this region. Right. And not the Carolinas, not the Gulf Coast, and certainly not places like California. And when we explain that energy, manufacturing jobs follow energy. And what we have is abundant economical energy.

And that's, when you look at that, it really eliminates probably 40 plus of the 50 states. But that's what's happening. So once we, and I can say this, the states do a phenomenal job of, they all do, of the three that I get to work with, of helping these folks find sites, they put together economic development packages, and work really close with local folks. So we're seeing that. And we're already seeing, you know, we talked about local companies expanding, but TCL is three-quarters of the way finished.

They're down the river. They're at New Martinsville. They're going to have, the original goal was, I think it was 100 folks. They've already announced an expansion for that property. They're going to be over 250 jobs in there. Really? And they're already, I mean we're talking about, they're building modules over in India and they're going to float them across the Pacific up the Ohio to that facility. But they've already done three quarters of the site work there.

Their first modules will be, I think, later this month or in October. So they're already moved. They plan to be in operation in 25. So they've already hired people. There's already contractors on that site. So next year?

Next year they're going to be in operation. But they've already, when we were in Charleston two months ago, they announced an expansion. They're going to be, operation. But they've already, when we were in Charleston two months ago, they announced an expansion. They're going to be, they're already looking at their second phase, which is more jobs. And that's just down the river from where we're sitting today. And what's exciting is the product that they're going to make is a food product they've been selling here for decades. Well, wait. On that note, we're going to stop right now because we're going to do a part

two. Okay? That's fine. Are you okay to stay? I'm fine. All righty. You got me fired up. I know I do.

I can see. I've got a handful of questions sitting in here. Yes, she does. Do I get to stay around for part two? You can stay around for part two. So everyone, thank you so much for joining us for Community Connections and Commerce. My name is Wendy Anderson. I'm sitting in for Drake Watson and as the host. So we'll hope he will be back soon. But if you have any questions for this first part, please send your questions to OUEpodcast.ohio.edu.

Again, that's ouepodcast.ohio.edu. My name is Wendy Anderson with Sam and Greg and Linda. We will be right back for part two. I'm out.