Rick Platt is President and CEO of the Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority with over three decades of experience in Ohio industrial development. He is a board member of JobsOhio.
An over $4 per gallon price of gasoline aside, stopping to fill your car’s gas tank seems fairly routine.
Learn what goes into making gasoline and producing power, however, and there’s nothing mundane about it. There’s so much more complexity, and economic impact, than meets the eye.
Ohio is at the center of it all.
First Thought: Tour an oil refinery, learn its complexity
Cenovus’ Lima oil refinery is nearly two hours away from Columbus. Yet, our routine ability to pull up to a gas pump and fill up in Central Ohio is owed to this plant and three others in Ohio.
I was glad to get a tour recently and learn more. What an eye opener.
There’s so much complexity. Yet, it would be easy to be dismissive about the 140-year-old refinery, which is the oldest continually operating refinery in the United States. Out of sight. Out of mind.
It’s not out of mind in Lima. In fact, facing a possible closure a few years back, the city rallied to find a buyer and keep the jobs and economic impact. It’s good for all of us they did.
It takes a lot of STEM-skilled people to keep it operating efficiently and make the jump between refining crude oil into gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel.
Another Thought: Supply chains are also complex
It is shocking how much supply chain impact there is. It’s a list too long to write down.
Pipelines push out the fuels across the state. Terminals miles away on the pipelines fill the trucks that keep our gas stations pumping. Marathon runs a major terminal in Central Ohio.
Railroad lines bring critical materials in and out. Every manufacturer and rail user benefits from spreading the costs of keeping the lines running across a wide industry base.
MPW, MISTRAS Group, Kokosing Industrial, and AMG Vanadium are among the companies that employ people in the middle of Ohio but with strong ties to the refineries and Ohio’s energy industry.
Third Thought: Other forms of energy also not mundane
Increased electricity use, coupled with lost electricity production, has made the business of power generation something that used to be out of sight and out of mind, but isn’t anymore.
However, now there is new power generation capacity planned galore. The PJM multi-state grid operator just accepted 811 applications for interconnection from generators of all types. Supply is coming.
The vast number of PJM applications and ones that hit the agenda at the Ohio Power Siting Board show a growing trend. A good one. Power generation is finding its way to where the users are.
It could still be out of sight and out of mind. For example, The Ohio State University’s Combined Heat and Power Plant is hidden in plain sight. Power can be generated in a building that’s visible right off State Route 315 on campus. One could drive by it and never know. OSU has found a way to make power generation feel, well, mundane.
We all need to embrace the more visible, complex energy production business. We all benefit. After all, there’s nothing mundane about energy production.
Rick Platt is President and CEO of the Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority with over three decades of experience in Ohio industrial development. He is a board member of JobsOhio.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: If you think Ohio’s energy economy is mundane, think again | Column
Reporting by Rick Platt, Guest Contributor / The Columbus Dispatch
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Rick Platt, Guest Contributor | USA TODAY Network
