Industrialized Appalachia: The External Growth Machine and Multi-Scalar Spatial Inequality Across Extractive Peripheries

The Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub (ARCH2) promised economic revitalization through clean energy transition yet reproduced historical patterns of extraction and spatial inequality. Though federal funding has stalled under the Trump administration, key components like the Monarch Compute Campus data center in Point Pleasant, West Virginia continue under private capital, demonstrating that extractive logic persists independent of a single policy regime. Drawing on a social impact assessment-based case study, this paper extends Molotch’s growth machine theory to extractive contexts by developing the concept of the “external growth machine,” or growth coalitions characterized by external elite control, extractive logic, and asymmetric rural-urban integration. I demonstrate how federal energy infrastructure projects in Appalachia operate through peripheral places rather than for them, perpetuating resource colony status while integrating rural localities into metropolitan energy systems. This framework reveals how ‘clean’ energy transitions can reproduce rather than transcend extractive capitalism, producing multi-scalar spatial inequality across landscapes.