Photo by Stephanie Elverd Smokestacks 1 and 2 came down at the W.H. Sammis Plant in Stratton on April 14, 2025, in Northern Jefferson County, closing both lanes of state Route 7 and marking the end of the coal-powered era in the Ohio Valley. Each smokestack stood about 500 feet high.

STEUBENVILLE — The current owners of the Sammis plant property are hoping to bring a data center to Jefferson County — but to make it happen, they need a declaration that it is one of Ohio’s priority investment areas.

House Bill 15, which takes effect in mid-August, authorizes local governments — in this case, the Jefferson County commissioners — to pass resolutions asking the Ohio Director of Development to designate sites in their jurisdictions as priority investment areas. That designation brings with it accelerated permit reviews, brownfield funding for site preparation and development costs plus a utility tax exemption.

Brownfield sites and former coal mines are eligible for the designation.

The Sammis site, acquired by Houston-based Energy Transition and Environmental Management in 2023, is in the demolition and remediation stage, with the structure above Ohio 7 in Stratton slated to go in the first quarter 2026.

“We’ve knocked down most of the buildings, and we expect to finish that project in the first quarter of 2027,” Dan McDevitt, co-founder and general counsel, told the Jefferson County commissioners Wednesday. “We’re now starting to think about what happens next at that site.”

Initially, McDevitt said they figured “some kind of industrial development,” perhaps a multi-modal transportation, would be a good site fit, “but the world has changed. What didn’t exist a year ago are these massive data centers … think of them as server farms, thousands and thousands of computers running artificial intelligence algorithms or serving cloud storage functions.”

McDevitt said the property has an on-site switching station and substation, so power can be imported or exported. There’s water and rail access as well as a large loading and unloading area.

“These data centers need power — we’re talking about a very significant amount of power, 500 megawatts of power, that these (centers) consume,” he said. “We’re not data center developers — our business is buying these difficult properties, we take on all the risks and responsibilities (to clean them up) and then we find someone else to do the forecast. When it’s finished, it looks like right now it (would work for) some sort of a data center development project. And the way they typically work these things is, we would sell it to a developer, they would build out the campus and then they lease it, lease the services from the server farms, to like a Google or an Amazon or something like that.”

McDevitt told commissioners if it happens that way it would be “a significant investment. You’re looking at billions of dollars in investment, jobs during construction … I think we tossed out a number of, say, 1,000 jobs while the thing’s being built, there’d be a couple, three years of construction time then maybe a couple hundred permanent jobs, (with) follow on employment that comes from that.”

McDevitt figures that priority investment designation is critical, saying HB 15 “is basically a reworking of Ohio’s energy policy.”

Commissioners say they’re intrigued, but said they need to “run it by the prosecutor’s office” first.

Commissioner Jake Kleineke said the Sammis site “probably would be a good place for an alternative power source, I think it would be a great opportunity to spark interest in other technology companies to come to our region.

“I see it as a great opportunity for the county to grow,” he said. “I just think it’s a good opportunity for the county to experience some growth versus it just sitting stagnant, growing grass.”

He said similar developments have brought “gigantic growth” already along the Interstate 270 corridor in Franklin County.