State Journal
March 6, 2017
By: Rebecca McPhail, president, WV Manufacturers Association
Rebecca McPhail is president of the WVMA, a role she has held since 2013. She previously served as the president of Vision Shared as well as the assistant vice president of development at Marshall University, among other positions. She resides in Huntington.
Natural gas use across the United States has seen a dramatic increase in recent years. According to the 2017 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook, a report produced by the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the U.S. has experienced a 79 percent surge in shale gas extraction since 2011 and a 12 percent jump in total gas production over the past five years. As the Factbook reports, “natural gas is now the number one source of power in the U.S., contributing 34 percent of the electricity mix in 2016, up from only 22 percent in 2007.”
