Shale Energy = Jobs, Jobs, Jobs!

Now able to deftly handle a giant truck and its 1,200-pound dirt load, a Lebanon woman sees the oil boom brewing in Ohio and plans to use it to fuel her next career.

Amber Eitniear is one of a growing number of adults headed back to career school to learn how to take advantage of the need for heavy equipment operators in eastern Ohio’s oil explosion.

Eitniear, who is raising three young boys, used to work in a northern Ohio factory until she was laid off last year.

Read the rest of the story at http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/201203272317/NEWS/303230152

Appalachia banks on natural gas, chemical plants

By Ernest Scheyder

In George Vacheresse’s lifetime, Appalachia has fallen from its prime when steel mills and coal mines anchored middle-class communities and offered hope there always would be enough work to go around.

In this historically poor region nestled in the misty mountains of the eastern United States, most steel mills shut down long ago and the coal workforce has shrunk by 90 percent in the past 40 years.

During the last recession, Appalachia lost all the jobs it gained from 2000 through 2008. Personal and small business income is roughly 25 percent lower than the rest of the United States and poverty is rife.

Now Vacheresse and other residents are counting on cheap natural gas from the massive reserves in the Marcellus and Utica shale rock formations, which lie under a swathe of the north-eastern United States, to reinvigorate the region’s economy.

In the Northern Appalachia area alone, where West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania converge, billions of dollars of investment is planned by major companies, including most recently Royal Dutch Shell, to recover the gas and build new chemical plants.

Read the story in it’s entirety at http://www.4-traders.com/CHESAPEAKE-ENERGY-CORPORA-12055/news/Appalachia-banks-on-natural-gas-chemical-plants-14209252/