Good news for Valley was millions of years in the making

The most recent chapter in Ma- honing Valley industrial history began about 400 million years ago.

That’s when a mixture of mud and vegetation got buried beneath limestone under what would someday be parts of New York, Pennsylvania West Virginia and Ohio. Even later, this geologic formation would be given its name, Marcellus Shale, from an outcropping near Marcellus, N.Y. And about 150 years after that, its importance to this Valley would become apparent.

Marcellus Shale covers an area equal to Pennsylvania and Ohio combined, but the good news locally was concentrated on a plot the size of a couple of city blocks straddling the border of Youngstown and Girard.

It was there that ground was broken for V&M Star’s expansion, a $650 million project that will provide construction jobs now and, eventually, 350 jobs making oil-country grade pipe.

Marcellus Shale lies a half mile to two miles beneath the surface, and the huge reserves of natural gas trapped in the shale could not be extracted economically in the past. Now, with new technology and increasing demand for clean-burning natural gas, investors are looking at drilling thousands of Marcellus Shale wells. And hundreds of miles of pipe for those wells will be coming from the Mahoning Valley.

Important commitment

But the hero of this story is not the shale, it’s the company that has made a commitment.

V&M and its French parent company, Vallourec, had options, but chose their Youngstown site. That’s a significant endorsement of the present work force at the plant — companies don’t expand where they haven’t been given reason to trust their workers. And at Monday’s ground breaking, Philippe Crouzet, chairman of the Vallourec management board, praised the “unprecedented collaboration between elected leaders, government professionals and the business community” in helping to bring the project to fruition.

Often enough, this space is occupied with editorials decrying dysfunction in government and society. It’s a welcome relief on a day such as this to comment on one of the things that is going right.

A major investment, a state-of-the-art plant and jobs for construction workers, steel workers, truck drivers, railroaders, managers and technicians will all be good for the Mahoning Valley. And the pipe produced at the plant will play its role in providing a valuable energy resource for the nation.