When C. Alan Walker, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, first told someone a cracker plant may come to Western Pennsylvania, someone remarked that they didn’t know Nabisco was expanding.

They were serious.

That was two years ago, before Marcellus Shale become a near-household word, key employment sector, and a contributor to the economy.  With natural gas being produced, the attention has shifted to drawing companies, such as the petrochemical industries, to the state, Mr. Walker said  at a session at the Marcellus Shale Coalition Shale Gas Insight Conference today in Philadelphia.

The state is at the center of an energy revolution,” Mr. Walker said. “Lower power prices can help the state re-shore: products now made overseas can be made here using a domestic fuel.”

Much talked about at the conference was the revival of refining and shipbuilding in the Philadelphia area connected to the gas and energy industry. The region would have lost 20,000 otherwise, Mr. Walker said.

Mr. Walker shared the dais with representatives from the chemical and plastics industry, which is dependent on fossil fuels as the feedstock for plastics used to make a range of products.  Royal Dutch Shell plans on building a cracker plant in Monaca, Beaver County that would use natural gas and natural gas liquids to produce feedstock for plastics and chemical makers.

The low cost of natural gas has made the domestic cracking, the process of converting hydrocarbons to simpler compounds, competitive.

“Ten years ago, if I said the U.S. was going to add a cracker plant I’d be laughed off the stage,” said Martha Gilchrist Moore, a senior director of the American Chemistry Council. Now, several are under development.

Many of the new plants are planned for the Gulf Coast, which has the brownfields and infrastructure for such activity, said Andrew Swanson of IHS Consulting. But eventually, plants will be added in other parts of the country, he said.

The operational costs of cracking natural gas in the U.S. is less than one-third the cost in Europe and Asia, where the industry used more expensive crude oil, Mr. Swanson said.

The natural gas in Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania is so-called dry gas and has less of the liquids useful to petrochemical companies.Gov. Tom Corbett addressed the audience for the first time after missing the inaugural Shale Gas Insight conference in 2011 to deal with devastating flooding in the Susquehanna River basin.

He aligned himself with the industry almost from his first words: “We, you, are creating jobs,” he said. “We are building our future.”

Mr. Corbett touted the industry’s contribution to revitalizing the manufacturing sector, cutting greenhouse gas emissions and lowering energy costs, as well as creating jobs. He characterized critics of the industry, who are holding a rally and march outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center today, as the “unreasoning opposition.”

“Our opponents agree that we can land a rover on Mars,” he said, “but they can’t bring themselves to think that we can safely drill a mile into our own soil.

“After all the predictions of disaster and the fearful warnings from people who have no understanding of the industry, Pennsylvania is reaping a bounty.”

Mr. Corbett embraced the industry’s statewide economic impact, including in areas, like Philadelphia, where no drilling is taking place. He credited the oil and gas industry for saving threatened refineries and spurring the prospect of a new petrochemical sector to take advantage of the so-called wet gas harvested in western Pennsylvania.

“Marcellus has reached into some very old corners of our economy and our state and brought them back to life,” he said.

In his 15-minute remarks, Mr. Corbett sounded only one note of caution, about the need to avoid the bust cycles that have plagued energy boomtowns in the past.

“We need vision, one that ties this state’s future to an economy unshackled by needless regulations, but which guards against the desolation of cut-and-run practices,” he said. “I’m convinced that we are at the beginning of a new industrial revolution and that you are at the tip of the spear.”

The heavily drilled Susquehanna County community of Dimock emerged in a political salvo between presidential campaign operatives at the Marcellus Shale Coalition’s Shale Gas Insight Conference in Philadelphia this morning.

Representatives from the presidential campaigns of President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney traded barbs over energy policy but both backed expanded use of natural gas in the nation’s energy landscape. But Dimock was a sore point for current state Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Michael Krancer, stumping for the Romney campaign. He described the federal Environmental Protection Agency as “rogue and out-of-control.”

“No one called the EPA into Dimock, the EPA called the EPA into Dimock,” Mr. Krancer said of what he perceived as an overreach of authority. “They spent millions of dollars of Superfund response money to show us exactly what we already knew in Pennsylvania – that drilling wasn’t contaminating water.”

For the roughly 2,000 registered attendees at the conference, it could have appeared to be an episode of Nightline. The talk was moderated by famous ABC newsman, Ted Koppel, who started the discussion with his recollections of the 70s gas crunch and the search for alternative energies.

Former DEP secretary, Kathleen McGinty, speaking for the Obama campaign, said while the EPA  found “no evidence” of contamination in Dimock, the industry and regulators should continue their focus on cementing and casing of wells and safety and environmental issues.

Mr. Obama has an “all of the above policy,” Ms. McGinty said. She noted that under the president, the U.S. has reached record natural gas production, a 14-year high in domestic oil production and 20-year low in oil imports.

“We have moved aggressively on alternative energy,” she said, noting a doubling in renewable power. Two new nuclear plants are in the works and employment in coal mining is up. Romney’s plan is all about oil, she said.

Mr. Krancer didn’t see it that way, criticizing the president’s policy as “nothing but what’s above ground: wind, water, and Solyndra,” alluding to a failed solar cell company with millions of government loans.