Shell cracker plant is a harbinger of the future
Trump visit, environmental protests show split
President Donald Trump is coming to Royal Dutch Shell’s petrochemical cracker in Beaver County on Tuesday for the same reason that some environmental and community groups plan to protest against it.
Like it or not, the $ 6 billion plant is a large link in an oil and gas supply chain — likely the harbinger of more chemical development in Appalachia and support for a struggling oil and gas industry overwhelmed by too much product and too few dollars.
The president’s trip is meant to highlight an economic strategy that “starts with having energy dominance and reliable, cost- effective sources of energy,” as well as how Western Pennsylvania will now be a “very attractive place” for manufacturers to set up shop, a senior Trump administration official said in a briefing Monday with reporters.
The administration — through Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who will be touring the Shell cracker alongside Mr. Trump, and DOE Assistant Secretary Steve Winberg — has embraced the petrochemical industry and the oil and
gas industry as beacons of economic potential.
Mr. Winberg, a former Consol Energy Inc. executive, even hired a full- time promoter for the “Appalachian petrochemical renaissance.” Ken Humphreys, a senior adviser to Mr. Winberg, said in June that he has been coordinating with federal agencies to shepherd petrochemical projects. He said if the opportunity is fully developed, it could yield 100,000 jobs in the industry.
The Shell cracker plant project was greenlit a few months before Mr. Trump was elected president in 2016. It has been considered the centerpiece of the region’s pitch for more such plants, as well as for a $ 10 billion natural gas liquids storage hub. The combination would help ethane, the feedstock for the cracker, develop its own local market in Appalachia.
Mr. Winberg said at a petrochemical conference in Pittsburgh in June that he and Mr. Perry “hit the road every chance we get to talk about this opportunity.”
“The EPA and other agencies are redesigning regulations to speed up these projects while still protecting the environment,” he said.
When asked for specifics, an EPA spokesman on Monday cited a number of Trump administration initiatives, including removing requirements for facilities that want to upgrade equipment to come up to current permitting standards. Another effort makes it easier for pipelines to secure water crossing permits under the Clean Water Act — in part by limiting the information that state regulators can consider and the time they have to consider it. He also noted the swapping out of the Obamaera Clean Power Plan — that administration’s hallmark climate change legislation — with the less restrictive Affordable Clean Energy rule.
The spokesman also said the Trump administration is getting ready to propose changes to oil and gas rules that will “remove regulatory requirements that are not appropriate to regulate, and will reduce unnecessary regulatory duplication, saving $ 85 million in regulatory costs from 2019 to 2025.”
He was referring to the regulation of methane, the main component of natural gas that is many times more powerful in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide in the short term.
The plastic dilemma
The Shell plant being built in Potter Township is a huge campus of factories whose job is to take in the natural gas liquid ethane, found in abundance in southwestern Pennsylvania shale wells, and churn out 3.5 billion pounds of plastic pellets each year.
The ethane will be “cracked,” or heated until it separates into its components, in seven furnaces fed by a 250- megawatt natural gas power plant onsite.
After being cracked, the resulting ethylene will flow into one of three processing units where it will be pelletized either as a linear lowdensity polyethylene material — used in products like flexible food containers or canoes — or high- density polyethylene, which can be made into plastic buckets, PVC pipes and milk jugs.
Earlier this summer, officials from Shell and Bechtel, the engineering and construction company building the project, gave an update on progress: About 5,000 workers are now on the project, they said, with the oftencited 6,000 “peak construction” threshold expected to be reached later this year.
When the facility opens — which Shell has vaguely maintained will be sometime in the beginning of the next decade — it will have 500 permanent employees.
The plant is rising on the banks of the Ohio River even as scientists raise alarm over the amount of plastic and microplastic — tiny particles — in the oceans and inside its dwellers.
The Environmental Protection Agency — whose chief administrator, Andrew Wheeler, is scheduled to accompany Mr. Trump on the Beaver County tour on Tuesday — says on its website that polyethylene and polypropylene are the most common types of plastic in the ocean.
“Global trends suggest that accumulations are increasing in aquatic habitats, consistent with trends in plastic production,” according to the website.
Concern over plastic pollution has prompted some local and state governments to ban plastic bags — California and Hawaii have outlawed them — and plastic straws. Seattle, home of Starbucks, banned plastic straws last year. Starbucks, too, said it would get rid of plastic straws next year.
Such efforts don’t win much sympathy in the White House: Presumably in response to such bans, the Trump campaign has begun selling red plastic straws, $ 15 for a pack of 10, because “liberal paper straws don’t work,” according to the campaign’s website.
Plastic pollution is one reason that a consortium of environmental groups and local interests have scheduled a protest in front of the Beaver County Courthouse on Tuesday to coincide with Mr. Trump’s tour of the cracker plant, slated for 1: 30 p. m.
“Here is another reason,” the Thomas Merton Center said in an email rallying its troops: “The cracker plant itself is allowed by the state to emit 2.2 million tons of carbon dioxide each year, which is the equivalent of about 480,000 cars.”
Environmental permits are not considered in aggregate. Each facility, well or pipeline is evaluated based on its own merits. So opponents take extra care to stress that Shell’s plant is just one part of a supply chain that revolves around fossil fuel extraction and heavy industry.
Supporters like to make the same point, justifying the $ 1.6 billion worth of tax breaks that Pennsylvania offered Shell to come here as enticing not just one plant but an entire industry.
In fact, at least two other cracker plants have been under consideration, with one in West Virginia looking unlikely, while a final decision on another in Ohio, permits already in hand, is expected at any time.