The Ohio River Valley, the proposed route for the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
The Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub (ASTH) is poised to become one of the biggest infrastructure projects in Appalachia. The planned petrochemical project, which has been estimated to cost around $10 billion, has attracted billions of dollars in investments from both Chinese and American companies.
Enthusiasts, from local government officials to petrochemical executives, say that the project will be the key to prosperity in the region and U.S. energy independence. Its critics, a loose coalition of researchers, environmentalists and concerned locals, say that the project will create few new jobs, and could cause disastrous environmental consequences.
But most outside of the region (and the field) haven’t even heard of the project. “They’ve been working on this for ten years with support from both the West Virginia and Ohio governments,” said Cheryl Johncox, a Sierra Club organizer, in a recent article for Blue Ridge Outdoors. “Despite this, it hasn’t been on the radar for most citizens or even many large environmental organizations.”
So, what is the ASTH? How would it work? And what impacts could it have on the region, and the country, as a whole?
The Background
Appalachia is a region in the Central-Eastern United States that is centered on the Appalachian Mountains. Natural gas companies have recently started…