By Esteban Fernandez
For Times West Virginian
Clarksburg — Natural gas is one of the most dangerous compounds to work with.
The gas is a fuel mixture composed primarily of methane, along with a small mix of other hydrocarbons like propane, butane and ethane. Methane itself is known to be highly combustible, contributing to the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion in 2010.
“Natural Gas is one of the most dangerous forms of energy we have,” Jonell Carver, Hope Gas chief operating officer, said. “So, the more we can teach in a controlled environment, the better.”
Hope Gas unveiled its new natural gas training facility Tuesday afternoon in Clarksburg. The Edward M. Smith National Career and Life Skills Development Center is a 20,000 square foot facility dedicated to training workers to work with natural gas.
Carver said the facility is state-of-art. Students won’t just learn hands-on skills, but also important safety procedures, she said.
The utility company began planning the training facility three years ago, and broke ground on the facility in the spring of 2025. The facility has classroom and conference space, as well as simulated training environments indoors and outdoors. The new facility was built on top of an older space the company used for training, which was inadequate for the company’s needs moving into the future, Carver said.
Carver said the demand for natural gas is incredible at the moment, especially as large industrial customers and large data centers need more energy. Carver said the number and scale of natural gas projects coming to the state will require more workers, which the company’s training facility will help produce. The company is partnering with local vocational and career technical education schools to produce more workers for the natural gas sector.
Hope CEO Morgan O’Brien said while coal has historically been the state’s main job provider, natural gas is becoming a much larger part of its future. Data centers are tied to that vision.
“We all have data needs, people need more data, right?” O’Brien said. “So, the need for more data is exponentially driving the need for more energy in this country. So, this country is screaming, we need more energy, and West Virginia is sitting on all this coal, which has always been a historically important part of West Virginia, but now I’ll say the new ingredient we have is natural gas.”
O’Brien said he doesn’t see natural gas supplanting coal as the state’s top energy fuel.
Gov. Patrick Morrisey also made an appearance. He connected the importance of the new training facility to his 50 by 50 plan, which calls for 50 gigawatts of energy capacity by 2050. Morrisey produced economic impact numbers since he announced his plan in September.
The state received roughly $10 billion in private investment creating more than 9,000 jobs, while the state has invested $1.5 billion into the 50 by 50 plan creating more than 1,000 jobs, he said. Morrisey also announced a natural gas pipeline project in Mason County worth $250 million.
Morrisey said the pipeline project will fund the construction of new homes in Mason County.
However, elements of the finance and data sectors are seeing signs of a bubble related to AI and data centers. One key question is whether that bubble will pop this year. O’Brien acknowledged the possibility of an overbuild of data centers. But he’s not nervous in the event of the AI bubble popping.
“Rather than building data centers where people are, they’re building it where energy is, right?” O’Brien said. “And that same principle could apply to manufacturing, advanced manufacturing and others. For us, we want people to learn the lesson that the data centers are teaching us, that it’s more efficient to build your factory where the energy is, rather than bringing the energy to where your factory is. That’s a formula West Virginia could sustain.”
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