Nov 22, 2012 3 min read

While still considered to be in its infancy, there’s no question that the natural gas industry continues to build out in the region at a rapid pace, impacting the economy, workforce development and the supply chain itself.

It’s also becoming part of a much bigger story about the country’s potential as a leading player in world energy markets, something that wasn’t dreamed of just a few years ago.

This month, The Energy Report includes stories about the continuing expansion of energy law firms in Southpointe, which followed the nearly 60 or so energy-related companies to the Cecil Township business park.

On the supply chain side, we talk with the founder of Steel Nation, a builder of structures to house natural gas compression stations, and the ways he’s helping companies design and construct safer and more quiet buildings.

“The smart operators have finally realized that to be a good neighbor, they can’t build tin cans,” says Steel Nation founder Mark Caskey, who has put up more than 250 compressor station buildings since launching in 2008.

The presence of the industry here is also creating growth in a variety of research from academia.

We covered the first-ever symposium on the boom and bust cycle of extraction industries at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

But research into the impact of the energy industry on communities and the economy isn’t the only thing gaining study these days.

Business writer Rick Shrum traveled to West Virginia University’s National Research Center for Coal and Energy in Morgantown, W.Va., to cover a discussion of a new type of storage battery for alternative energy sources. The university’s Center for Electrochemical Energy Storage was launched a month ago to help develop large-volume, affordable batteries.

But technological developments aren’t consigned to just one type of energy; they’re being worked out in labs and test sites for advancement of a variety of energy source possibilities.

And with those efforts in mind, we also provide stories on the latest developments in attempts to extract methane fuel contained in ice off the coast of Alaska, as well as the challenges to making the mass distribution of solar energy in the Southwest possible.

While The Energy Report focuses primarily on developments in the Marcellus Shale play and how they impact the area economically, the growing output of the Marcellus and other shale plays around the country are entering the international spotlight.

Various government projections have the United States becoming a global leader in both natural gas and oil production by the end of this decade or the middle of the next one.

The Associated Press story covering a potential “cold war” over gas provides an insight into the ways the abundance of natural gas in the U.S. has Russia’s Gazprom concerned about how it will compete with America’s potential for exporting some of its natural gas to the rest of the world, or help Poland and other Eastern European countries learn to tap shale for their own source of energy.

This month, The Energy Report brings you energy news from the region, the country and the world.