Ohio shale drilling spurs job hopes in Rust Belt

But the project is not without controversy.

Susan Helper, a Case Western Reserve University professor who studies manufacturing issues, said such job projections are suspect, in part because the estimate of natural gas reserves may be inflated.

She said the industry and politicians have a self-interest in rosy projections. “It’s a way of saying to environmentalists and others that say slow down, `Gee, you’re preventing all this potential great job growth here’,” she said.

V&M Star, with production locations in Youngstown, Houston and Muskogee, Okla., will ramp up production over the next year, creating seamless pipe to bring gas or oil to the surface.

“Not only do we have an experienced workforce but … our market is in our backyard,” said Joel Mastervich, the company’s president and chief operating officer.

Rick Mazza, 52, who has experienced the industrial decline firsthand, likes the initial boost that V&M Star has generated for his commercial-residential heating and cooling business. He’s hired two more workers in the past year.

“It’s going to be a good spillover for us, especially with this depression or recession, whatever we’re in now,” said Mazza, who was laid off repeatedly in the 1980s at the General Motors Corp. plant in nearby Lordstown.

The Youngstown-Warren region has lost more than 28,000 jobs in the past 10 years, two-thirds of them in manufacturing. The Youngstown population has declined to about 67,000, less than half of what it was some 40 years ago, and the city is aggressively bulldozing dilapidated houses to reconfigure itself as a smaller city.

The city has a center that nurtures small-business development and has worked to upgrade the neighborhood around Youngstown State University, an important job source with more than 2,000 employees.

Despite the efforts, there was renewed evidence of the city’s decline in a Nov. 3 Brookings Institution report that said Youngstown has the nation’s highest concentration of poverty among the 100 biggest metro areas.

Boosters in the region cite additional evidence of an improving manufacturing climate, including a mechanical engineering firm that expanded from Michigan to Youngstown and the hot-selling Chevrolet Cruze built in Lordstown.

In August, the U.S. Geological Survey said the Marcellus Shale region from New York to Ohio contains some 84 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, recoverable natural gas, far more than thought nearly a decade ago. Some geologists have put the figure even higher, but those estimates are controversial .

The Utica formation covers much of eastern Ohio and crosses through New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.

Permits allowing hydraulic fracturing in Ohio’s portion of the Marcellus and the deeper Utica Shale have risen from one in 2006, to four in 2009, to at least 32 this year, state records show. Pennsylvania has nearly 3,500 Marcellus wells sunk, most since 2008, and more than 500 permits have been issued this year in West Virginia.

Environmentalists are critical of the process, which utilizes chemical-laced water and sand to blast deep into the ground and free the shale gas. Critics fear the process itself or the drilling liquid, which can contain carcinogens, could contaminate water supplies, either below ground, by spills, or in disposed wastewater.

Mark Brownstein, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund, said it’s up to regulators and drillers to make sure shale industry jobs are created while protecting the environment.

At a family-owned tavern in Youngstown managed by Larry Maffitt, the talk is focused on a brighter jobs future.

Steel workers coming off shifts around the clock had the place packed three deep years ago, but there were just 10 people on a recent day.