Pennsylvania is at a crossroads: The resources that fueled Pennsylvania’s past growth are plateauing or petering out.

“Coal employment has gone off a cliff,” said Seth Blumsack, who runs the Center for Energy Law and Policy at Penn State.

“You had an influx of natural gas jobs
— that growth has largely leveled off, as Pennsylvania hit this kind of steady state of gas production.”

This isn’t the first time Pennsylvania’s core economic drivers have waned.

Factories and steel mills took a beating in the 1970s and 1980s, as foreign producers competed in earnest with America’s industrial machine.
Plants that sustained whole towns closed down, with nothing to replace them.

The ironworks Andrew Carnegie built in 1875 still operates on the bank of the Monongahela River, but owner U.S. Steel is desperately trying to unload it to Japan’s Nippon Steel.

These conditions have created new opportunities for the #clean #energy #transition to take hold.

Political leaders like Democratic Gov. #Josh #Shapiro and business owners are embracing low-carbon industry as an economic development strategy for the energy-rich state.

Shapiro has pushed to strengthen the state’s outdated #clean #energy standard for #power #production,
and he signed a bill this summer to establish ground rules for developing #carbon-#sequestration projects.

His administration recently won $400 million in federal funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(“the second-largest federal grant in Pennsylvania’s history,” a spokesperson for the governor pointed out).

Pennsylvania will disburse that money in competitive grants to industrial entities proportional to their ambitions at carbon reduction;

The Shapiro administration wants the ensuing projects to slash statewide industrial emissions 10 percent by 2050.

Given the state’s long history of oil and gas, #hydrogen production is sure to loom large.

In the lower-carbon future, clean hydrogen could become the next key energy commodity.

Last year, Biden’s Department of Energy awarded seven proposed hydrogen hubs around the country roughly $1 billion each.

Pennsylvania, as Shapiro regularly points out, was the only state to win funding for two:

The Philadelphia-based hub is slated to produce hydrogen with nuclear power and renewables,
while the Pittsburgh-based hub will focus on turning fossil gas into hydrogen and stowing the ensuing emissions underground.

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy-manufacturing/can-energy-rich-pennsylvania-chart-a-path-towards-decarbonization