When I first saw the gas industry coming to northern Pennsylvania, I knew I didn’t want to go back to the pipeline.
Pipeline work had been good to me. It paid for my education at Pennsylvania College of Technology. It taught me how to work. It taught me how to solve problems. But I also knew I had a habit of looking at things sideways. While everybody else was trying to figure out where the next pipeline would go, I was trying to figure out what came after the pipeline.
So I started a newspaper.
At the time, nearly everyone thought I was making a mistake. Websites were the future. Print was dead. The internet was going to change everything.
Maybe so. But the people saying that were staring at technology while I was staring at customers.
Most of the people making decisions in the Marcellus weren’t carrying smartphones yet. They were reading newspapers at kitchen tables and township meetings. While everyone else was trying to predict the future, I was paying attention to the present.
The newspaper did well. Well enough that I was making a living comparable to many field jobs without spending my life in hotel rooms. The funny part was how many people thought I didn’t work. My truck sat in the driveway because my office was inside the house. That absolutely confused people. I’d run into somebody at the grocery store and they’d ask, “Still doing that newspaper thing?”
Yep.
“You ought to get a real job.”
Meanwhile, I was running a company forty hours a week. The lesson stuck with me. People aren’t stupid. They simply struggle to recognize opportunity when it arrives wearing unfamiliar clothes.
Which brings me to data centers.
Everywhere you turn, somebody is talking about AI. Data centers have become the economic development equivalent of a winning lottery ticket. They need power. We have gas. End of discussion.
Except maybe it isn’t.
Because whenever everybody starts talking about the same opportunity, I find myself asking a different question.
What are we not talking about?
The more I dig into the future of natural gas, the more I wonder whether data centers are becoming the equivalent of the oil well in 1880. Important? Absolutely. But perhaps not where the real story ends.
Take carbon materials.
Most people hear the words “natural gas” and think heat, electricity, and power plants. Researchers increasingly hear something else. Carbon.
Companies and universities are actively developing ways to turn natural gas into carbon nanotubes, graphene, synthetic graphite, and advanced carbon products. These materials are showing up in aerospace, batteries, defense systems, electronics, and next-generation manufacturing.
Think about that for a minute.
We currently burn natural gas for a few dollars per thousand cubic feet. Scientists are exploring ways to convert that same gas into materials worth hundreds or even thousands of times more per pound.
That isn’t science fiction.
That’s happening right now.
Then there’s hydrogen.
Hydrogen gets talked about as if it’s some futuristic technology from a science fair project. In reality, most hydrogen today is already produced from natural gas. What is changing is the potential market. Heavy trucking, industrial manufacturing, steel production, shipping, and backup power systems are all exploring hydrogen applications.
If data centers become the electricity story, hydrogen could become the industrial fuel story.
And then there is fertilizer.
I know. Fertilizer doesn’t exactly make magazine covers.
But fertilizer plants consume enormous quantities of natural gas, and the United States still relies heavily on imports for critical agricultural inputs. Natural gas is one of the primary building blocks of nitrogen fertilizer. If national security, food security, and supply chains continue dominating economic discussions, fertilizer manufacturing could become a far bigger story than most people realize.
The same can be said for advanced manufacturing.
The shale boom has spent twenty years teaching us how to extract energy. The next phase may involve using cheap energy to attract industries that consume large amounts of it. Specialty glass. Advanced ceramics. Metal processing. Chemical manufacturing. Battery materials. Components for aerospace and defense industries. Historically, cheap energy has always attracted manufacturing.
Always.
Pittsburgh wasn’t built because somebody loved coal.
Detroit wasn’t built because somebody loved iron ore. Industries formed around resources. The resource was simply the magnet.
Then there is greenhouse agriculture, which sounds almost ridiculous until you look at what the Dutch accomplished. The Netherlands is smaller than many American states and became one of the world’s largest agricultural exporters by using technology and energy intelligently. Cheap energy can power climate-controlled agriculture, vertical farming, food processing, and year-round production in places where winter once shut everything down.
None of these industries may sound as exciting as artificial intelligence. Then again, neither did data centers twenty years ago. That’s the point.
Everybody can see the shiny object. The harder skill is spotting the second and third order opportunities that follow behind it.
Data centers may absolutely become part of the Marcellus future. They should. But if history teaches us anything, it is that the greatest wealth is rarely created by selling the resource itself. It is created by the people who figure out what the resource makes possible.
Twenty years ago everyone was talking about drilling wells. They talked about Natural Gas in your heater. They talked about “FRACKING” – (GAG, I hated those days explaining the principles of stimulation to over educated college professors who…. I’ll stop ) and now we’re looking at the next new thing and the next great o pportunity in Appalachia may already be emerging quietly in a laboratory, a pilot plant, a university research center, or a startup nobody has heard of yet.
And if experience has taught me anything, it’s this:
When everybody is looking at the truck in the driveway, sometimes the real work is happening inside the house.