S. Korean, Ohio firms to build chemical plant

COLUMBUS » Gov. John Kasich said Monday that a major South Korean industrial plant builder has joined an effort to build a multibillion-dollar petrochemical plant in eastern Ohio to take advantage of the region’s oil-and-gas boom.

Kasich, a Republican, called the partnership between Seoul-based Daelim Industrial and Thailand’s PTT Global Chemical a “game-changer” for the proposed plant, which has idled in the planning stages for years. Daelim, according to its website, is South Korea’s oldest construction company and an expert in petrochemical technology.

“If this can happen, and I’m more optimistic ultimately that this will happen, we’re not just interested in this,” he said during a news conference. “We’re interested in building an entire community of technology.”

The U.S. subsidiary of PTT has been working for several years with officials from JobsOhio, Ohio’s privatized economic development office, on a proposal to build the plant on the site of a former FirstEnergy coal-fired power plant along the Ohio River in Belmont County.

The facility, commonly referred to as an ethane cracker, would convert ethane, a byproduct of natural gas drilling, into a hydrocarbon called ethylene that’s further processed and used for plastics production and has other industrial uses.

Monday’s announcement again stopped short of a full commitment by either firm to build the plant, which Kongkrapan Intarajang, PTT’s chief operating officer, said will approach $7.5 billion. JobsOhio officials said that decision could come by the end of 2018.

“What they would build here would be probably the leading technological effort at cracking gas in the world,” Kasich said.