The Charleston Area Alliance made news today with its latest Elevations Professional Women’s Network luncheon. On Thursday at the Charleston Marriott Town Center, women leaders in the natural gas, coal and related industries addressed the opportunities and challenges ahead for West Virginia’s energy sector. The event was presented by Steptoe & Johnson PLLC.

Sharon O. Flanery, a petroleum engineer and attorney who leads the Steptoe & Johnson Energy Team, moderated a roundtable discussion about the future of energy in the Mountain State. Panelists included: Maribeth Anderson, director of corporate development for Chesapeake Energy Corporation; Tania Hotmer, manager of external affairs at AEP; and Linda Raines Torre, co-founder and senior engineer for Decota Consulting, a mining/environmental consulting firm.

More than 150 business executives, lawyers, engineers and other professionals were in attendance. The mission of the 1,700-member Elevations Professional Women’s Network is to “enrich, empower and elevate women to achieve success.”  Through luncheons and other events featuring high-profile speakers, Elevations provides an affirmative network that connects professional women with the information, resources and contacts that helps them, their businesses and their communities succeed. Elevations is presented by the Charleston Area Alliance and Title Sponsor Dow Chemical Company.

From the Charleston Daily Mail:

Panel discusses women’s role in energy industry
by Melanie Hoffman
Daily Mail staff

The energy industry might be dominated by men, but Tania Hotmer said women serve an important role as well.

“Women are starting to play a more critical role in business,” she said. “Women are able to reach a crowd men can’t.”

Hotmer was one of three women from the energy industry on a panel sponsored by the Charleston Area Alliance Thursday. She is the external affairs manager for Appalachian Power.

“I started out as an administrative assistant,” she said. “It challenged me more to work harder, and it drove me to do my best.”

Going into meetings where there would be one or two women in a group of 10 started out intimidating, she said.

Maribeth Anderson, director of corporate development for Chesapeake Energy Corp., and Linda Raines Torre, cofounder and senior engineer for Decota Consulting, also served on the panel.

Torre grew up on a farm in West Virginia with a lot of brothers and cousins.

“I just work,” she said. “I have a lot of respect for the people I work with and do work for and relate well to them. I enjoy getting out there with steel toed boots and a hard hat on.”

The women spoke of their respective industries – coal, power and gas – to an audience of about 100. The audience consisted mostly of female Alliance members and workers in the industry.

The region of Marcellus shale recently discovered in West Virginia and Pennsylvania might be the second largest discovery of its kind in the world.

“We need to take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity we have,” Anderson said.

In 2009, the gas industry produced 5,000 jobs. In 2020, it’s expected to produce more than 17,000, Anderson said.

The biggest challenge the gas industry faces is hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” she said, which uses large amounts of water mixed with chemicals to release gas from the underground shale rocks.

The public thinks the process is sucking the streams dry and that spills happen every day, she said.

“And none of that is true, at all,” she said. “I don’t know why all this happened this year.”

For power, Hotmer said the increase in customer demand means rates will continue to go up.

A lack of workers, especially experienced ones, could hurt the coal industry, Torre said. The experience is retiring, she said, and people are hesitant to start in the business because the future is unclear.

“When you don’t know where you go next, it’s hard to do,” she said.

All three women agreed on one thing – their industries are helping to spur the economy, but they’re not trying to hurt the environment.

Elizabeth Keightley, senior vice president for BB&T Wealth Management, said the program was a “great form of education.”

“They really represented diversity in terms of perspective,” she said. “They put it in a way the audience can relate to.”

She said she enjoyed hearing the “real facts.”

“There’s bias within the popular media against the industry,” Keightley said. “I think this sort of thing helps dispel myths, especially concerning the environment.”

For more information on the Alliance, visit www.charlestonareaalliance.org.

Contact writer Melanie Hoffman at melanie.hoffman@dailymail.com or 304-348-4886.

http://www.dailymail.com/Business/201107281454?page=2&build=cache