September 23, 2025
The development of the Shell Chemical cracker plant appears to be the catalyst for a population turnaround in Beaver County and its neighbors, an analysis of U.S. Census data reveals.
Nearly every year since 2000, Beaver and neighboring Lawrence, Columbiana (OH), and Hancock (WV) counties had seen more people moving out to destinations elsewhere in the U.S. than people and families moving in.1
Yet since the Shell cracker began operation in late 2022 with its permanent workforce, each of the four counties has seen two consecutive years of positive domestic migration, something not seen in more than a generation.
The turnaround is significant. In Beaver County, for instance, the new inbound residents in 2023 and 2024 more than offset the departures that took place from 2020 to 2022.
This population finding is important as other mega-projects are proposed for southwest Pennsylvania and communities explore the potential benefits of these projects. The Beaver County data imply that creating jobs and economic opportunity will attract new residents, just as one would expect.
The four counties continue to see their overall population shrink, however. Because of their aging populations, deaths greatly outnumber births each year. The new migration patterns only lessen the population challenge. They do not solve it entirely.
But encouraging domestic migration is the one component of a community’s population that public policies and elected officials can most directly affect.
The Census Bureau analyzes population changes by four components: births, deaths, international migration, and domestic migration. Departures from the region over the past four decades have left fewer residents of child-rearing age, so there are now fewer families with fewer children being born to offset the deaths in the elderly population.
International migration, meanwhile, often depends on a host of factors that are beyond local control, including federal policies and global geopolitics.
Not so with domestic migration, the people who come to a community from elsewhere in the U.S., or those who depart for elsewhere in the country. This is the kind of mobility we most commonly think of when we talk about young people leaving for better jobs elsewhere or relocating to someplace more attractive for a better quality of life.
The right investments and policy decisions can help attract new residents. More jobs, lower taxes, better schools, recreational facilities and beautiful parks, and updated infrastructure can make a community a place where people want to move. On the flipside, letting those things decay can push people to leave, thinking they can find a better life elsewhere.
More departures than arrivals has been the situation in the four counties for decades. Since 2000, nearly every year saw more people leave these four counties for a new life elsewhere than moved in. That began to change about the same time Shell made its decision to build its ethylene cracker in Beaver County.
After seeing outbound migration for 11 of the previous 12 years, Beaver County saw a significant uptick in 2012 and 2013, when Shell announced the county as the site for its $14 billion cracker facility. Nine more years of outmigration followed, until the plant began operation in late 2022.
We don’t know whether these gains are a result of more people moving into the counties than before, or fewer people leaving. And it is impossible to say for certain exactly why people are choosing to buck a 25-year trend.
But other nearby counties in Ohio and Pennsylvania have not seen the same kind of sharp turnaround. If these new migration patterns were the result of macro trends, such as high mortgage interest rates discouraging people from moving, you would expect to see them play out in the same way in different counties.
Armstrong County, for instance, is about the same distance from Pittsburgh as Lawrence County but in the opposite direction of the cracker plant. Armstrong saw a small positive blip in 2021 and 2022, perhaps a result of covid relocations out of the city. But it reverted to its historical trend of outmigration in 2023 and 2024.
Even so, it is worth noting several caveats. Annual migration estimates from the Census Bureau are notoriously imprecise, especially since the covid disruption. Multi-year trends are more reliable.
And for whatever reason, the impact of the cracker does not seem to be showing up in the economic data. Beaver County’s GDP when adjusted for inflation was essentially the same in 2023, the first full year of cracker operation, as it was in 2022.2 (Data for 2024 is not yet available.) Meanwhile, jobs in Beaver County rose slightly from 2023 to 2024, but the total is still lower than it was in 2022 before full-time operation began.3
These population and economic trends bear watching. But it appears the cracker has been a catalyst for a population turnaround in the cluster of counties along the PA-OH-WV border.
Something to keep in mind as cracker-sized power generation and data center campuses are under development in Indiana, Beaver, and Greene counties.
Ken Zapinski
412-352-4364; ken@pghworks.com
