MarkWest Utica EMG and Kinder Morgan announced a joint venture last week to build a natural gas processing plant in Tuscarawas County. The plant, which will be in the twin cities area of Urichsville and Dennison, will no doubt bring new economic opportunities to the region. The facility will consist of two 200 million-cubic-feet-per-day cryogenic processing plants, which will remove natural gas liquids like ethane, propane, butane and pentane from Utica Shale gas.
The complex will be built in RushTownship at an existing 220-acre site already under option with Kinder Morgan. This is good news for Tuscarawas County, whose mayor is already excited by the economic benefits the plant will bring to the region.
“Everything that’s going to go on out there will be good for Uhrichsville,” Uhrichsville Mayor Terry Culbertson said recently.
The Tuscarawas complex will create hundreds of construction jobs in the area, similar to what both Cadiz has experienced with MarkWest and Scio with M3 Momentum’s Utica East Ohio plant. These new jobs will also help boost the local economy, as the workers will purchase goods and services from local businesses.
Let’s look at how this has played out elsewhere: In 2011 Cadiz collected just over $630,000 in local income taxes. The next year, tax receipts grew to more than $760,000 – an 18 percent increase. As of May 31st of this year, Cadiz has already collected more income tax than it did during all of 2011. Sales tax revenues increased 21 percent in just one year. Much of that new revenue came from people working on the construction of the new MarkWest complex.
The first portion of the Tuscarawas plant is scheduled to be operational by the fourth quarter of 2014 and will service customers in Carroll, Columbiana, Mahoning, and Trumbull counties in the northern portion of the Utica play.
The announcement of the new plant makes it the sixth processing plant announced for Ohio over the past 18 months. Ohio has already seen the tremendous benefits associated with continued development, including supporting 38,000 jobs. As the Utica continues to develop, it will continue to help lift eastern Ohio’s economy – welcome news for a state that’s still fighting back from the recent recession.