Autos Added to Area Research
The Charleston Gazette, June 29, 2005
By Jennifer Ginsberg, Staff writer
Gov. Joe Manchin has issued the group that runs a biotechnology incubator in South Charleston a challenge: incorporate the automotive industry. The city of South Charleston received a $1.5 million grant in December from the state to establish the biotech incubator at the South Charleston Technology Park. The city was to pass that grant on to the Chemical Alliance Zone to lease the incubator space from Dow, continue building renovations, and to use some of the money to bring in high-tech equipment for the businesses to share in the future. Now, that money also will be used for automotive research.
The Mid-Atlantic Technology, Research and Innovation Center, a South Charleston research and technology firm, received $600,000 in tax credits from the state’s economic development authority last month. MATRIC can give the tax credits to investors or contributors who meet certain criteria. Those credits will now go toward automotive-related ventures, said Steve Spence, executive director of the West Virginia Development Office.
“It’s not really switching gears, it’s adding a gear,” said Manchin’s spokeswoman Lara Ramsburg. “It’s not changing the work they were looking to do, we still encourage that. It might work to expand the universe to include automotives.”
Automotive research is a very technical, engineering type of research that’s a good fit with the skills and facilities in South Charleston, said the Chemical Alliance Zone’s executive director, John Maher.
The automotive collaboration is natural for MATRIC, said its president and CEO, Keith Pauley. The group was formed to tap into the resources of Kanawha Valley’s retired scientists and its primary mission is to become a catalyst for large-scale research across the state, Pauley said. “At the heart of our mission is cooperation between state universities, research communities and to go after larger and more significant research,” he said.
Pauley said the automotive industry has a number of different problems that require technology solutions that fit into MATRIC’s core knowledge areas of chemical products, biosystems and software development. He pointed to an example of when Union Carbide developed a research emissions control. He said he wasn’t surprised but rather excited with Manchin’s desire to put the automotive research center on a fast track, which could enhance the cluster of automotive companies between Huntington and Charleston.
“He took [the] initiative to make West Virginia not just a manufacturing location, but also research and development,” Pauley said.
While on a trade mission in Japan earlier this month, Manchin and Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said they wanted to see research and production for Toyota’s hybrid engines done in West Virginia. A Toyota executive said the company was “very much overwhelmed by the positive reaction from America” over hybrids.
“He [Manchin] wants to move forward and keep going back to Toyota and provide them with more information, aggressively follow up and show them where our strengths are,” Spence said.
The project’s next step is for a committee of people from the Development Office, Chemical Alliance Zone, MATRIC, West Virginia University and Marshall University to meet and see where the region’s automotive industry is and inventory the available skills. The ultimate goal is to create more jobs and research capabilities and build on the strengths of the state’s existing automotive industry, Spence said. “All this ties into opportunities we identified in Japan.”
