Yet another company tied to shale development is making the Buckeye State their home. Unimin Corp., based in New Canaan, Connecticut is establishing a distribution terminal in Navarre. The company provides proppants used in the hydraulic fracturing process.  Proppant, usually sand, is used to keep the paper-thin fractures open to allow gas and oil to release from the shale.

The company chose Navarre because of its easy access to railroad and highway.  The facility will be one of seven under Unimin. Other locations are spread throughout Pennsylvania and West Virginia, serving customers in the Utica/Point Pleasant and Marcellus Shale formations.  The Ohio facility will operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to provide proppant to the growing industry.  Louis Mastandrea, Executive Vice President of Unimin, commented on the importance of their new facility in the region:

This new footprint in the Utica formation is an important addition to our proppant delivery network. The Navarre terminal reaffirms our commitment to cost-effectively deliver superior proppants that will maximize hydrocarbon recovery in the region—Louis Mastandrea (Drilling suppliers to open terminal in Navarre, 2/28/13)

Unimin’s distribution center joins a growing number of facilities popping up around the state supporting the oil and gas industry.  M3 Midstream, Access Midstream, and EnerVest Energy Partners are partnering to build two cryogenic processing facilities, in Leesville and Kensington, and one fractionation plant in Scio. MarkWest is also opening a processing plant in Harrison County in the village of Cadiz. Processing plant and pipeline investment coming to Ohio totals $7 billion.

The Unimin facility and the plethora of other plants coming online in the coming year are adding additional benefit to the more than 38,000 jobs shale development has already created in Ohio.  As more midstream facilities and infrastructure are developed, production will also increase.  This means more demand for products like those distributed by Unimin, and more companies making Ohio their home.

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