News

July 5, 2008

Carney touts economic potential of ‘corridor’

Accessibility to big cities means region can gain high-paying ‘green-collar’ jobs if it combines its assets, he says.

HARVEYS LAKE – Just because Northeast Pennsylvania has mined away most of its energy legacy doesn’t mean it can’t write a new chapter. It’s poised, in fact, to do just that, says U.S. Rep. Chris Carney, D-Dimock Twp., if it fuses its transportation, agricultural and technological assets.

Carney argues that creating a “technology corridor” along interstates 80 and 81 would be a magnet for “green-collar jobs,” attracting alternative-energy producers and the suppliers of producers, because of the region’s accessibility to major metropolitan areas.

“We can get to the Midwest and the Northeast like that,” Carney said, snapping his fingers over a plate of pizza-joint hot wings.

The economic potential is striking, he said. “It takes one success.”

He’s banking on companies like EthosGen, which is attempting to market a patented scalable process of unlocking more sugar than usual from a robust switchgrass variety using a specific enzyme. “If they’re able to produce the stuff … it’ll take off like crazy,” Carney said.

EthosGen is working with a regional greenhouse to produce pilot batches and hopes to be commercially viable by mid-summer.

Carney’s ideas strike a chord with Jim Abrams, the 25-year-old director of EthosGen and its co-founder along with his father. “He understands that it’s a community. It’s a region. One company can’t stand alone,” Abrams said.

“We’re in the main vein to get to any metropolitan area of the highest energy users in the world,” he echoed.

State officials reiterate the local economic implications, and there’s research to support the argument.

“Since 2003, we’ve helped create 3,000 new jobs in the alternative and renewable energy sectors – many of which are good-paying, skilled manufacturing positions – and $1 billion in private investment,” Gov. Ed Rendell said on Friday at a “Good Jobs, Green Jobs” conference in Pittsburgh, adding that unemployment in the state has been below the national average for more than a year.

The ethanol industry added $47.6 billion to the nation’s gross domestic product in 2007 through operations, transportation and capital spending for new plants, according to a report created by John Urbanchuk, the director of the expertise and analysis services firm LECG.

The report, which was commissioned by the Renewable Fuels Association, on ethanol’s contribution to the national economy also notes that, if all of the ethanol produced was sold, its addition to federal coffers repaid an additional $1.2 billion above federal subsidies.

Rory Sweeney, a Times Leader staff writer, may be reached at 970-7418.

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