West Virginia aluminum plant earns $100 million in federal funds

RAVENSWOOD, WV (WOWK) – A $100 million investment is bringing big-time opportunities to Jackson County after the U.S. Department of Energy selected the Constellium aluminum plant to begin award negotiations to boost manufacturing.

This money, federally funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, is expected to create a safer work environment within the plant and reduce overall carbon emissions.

State officials and higher-ups within the plant credit the employees as the main reason why this plant was selected as “an obvious choice” in receiving these funds.

“I’m always reminded in events like this of what makes us strong, and it’s really the people,” Constellium CEO Jean-Marc Germain said. “We’ve got a wonderful plant here, but it’s really the people that it perform, and I’m really proud that this community of workers has been able to achieve such great results and put us in a place where today we can announce this investment.”

Germain added, “These investments are hard to make. They’re hard to justify. We know we want to decarbonize in the future. These investments are allowing us to do it now.”

A huge push in this investment is bringing West Virginia up to pace in statewide manufacturing.

“The purpose was for us to be more energy independent and today as I speak to you, we are producing more energy than ever in the history of the United States of America. We are producing more energy than anybody in the world,” U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin said. “This is all we’re doing here is we’re leading the charge to keep manufacturing in America. We’re producing the building blocks that we need every day for our country, for our defense of our nation, and for also the products that we rely on a daily basis but doing it better than anywhere else rather than relying on other parts of the world to do it for us. We’re bringing manufacturing back.”

Sen. Manchin also said this is the “first time in over 40 years” that the United States has been energy independent.

“On top of that, these two bills are bring opportunities to bring manufacturing back. We allowed that to escape us 20 or 30 years ago. That was a bad mistake we made,” Sen. Manchin said.

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