Double standard for justice
A trip to Mexico? Really?
Regarding “Senate agrees to hear case against Trump,” (A1, Feb. 10): Jenny Cudd, a Midland florist, asked a federal court not to inconvenience her by preventing her from taking a weekend trip to Mexico. Cudd is a white woman initially charged with “misdemeanor counts of entering and remaining on restricted grounds and disorderly conduct or violent entry” during the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol. She has been released without bond. Violently breaching the Capitol is just a misdemeanor, similar to a minor traffic violation? Since when? Contrast that with Crystal Mason, an African American woman, whom a Texas state court sentenced to five years in prison for illegally casting a provisional ballot because she had not yet completed her term of supervised release from prison. The African American woman gets five years for not understanding voting rules regarding probationers, and a white woman has only traffic citation-like charges for rampaging through the Capitol. If that’s called justice, justice is upside down.
Patrick J. Killman, Houston
The global petrochemical market is expected to grow by as much as 5 percent a year through 2030, according to Canadian marketing research organization Precedence Research.
The industry’s growth, a 61 percent jump to $729 billion from $453 billion, would benefit the Houston area and Texas Gulf Coast, home to major operations for most of the world's largest petrochemical companies, including U.S. companies ExxonMobil Chemical, Chevron Phillips, DuPont and Dow, Germany's BASF, Netherlands-based LyondellBasell and Saudi Arabia's SABIC. Together they employ tens of thousands of workers in the region.
The companies produce ethylene, propylene, toluene, methanol and benzene, among other chemicals, which play a crucial role in the global economy. Ethylene dominated the overall market in
2020, Precedence said, with more than a 25 percent share of revenue because of its wide use in transportation, construction and packaging.
The industry's expected rally, Precedence said, will be driven by increasing use of petrochemicals in industrial applications such as construction, automotive, aviation, food, electrical, paint, paper and pulp. Petrochemicals also are used to make thousands of products, including wind turbines, solar power panels, furniture, cosmetics, medicines, electronics and plastics. With the industry prepared to grow, Precedence said, feedstock prices have fallen amid the wider production of North American shale gas.
The industry's major operators have committed billions of dollars in recent years to expanding operations in the Houston area. ExxonMobil and Chevron Phillips, for example, have spent billions of dollars to expand chemical facilities in Beaumont and Baytown. LyondellBasell is spending $2.4 billion to expand operations in Bayport. And Chevron Phillips this year is set to announce a location for a $5.8 billion expansion.
The Precedence report drew on data from North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East and Africa. The Asia-Pacific region dominated the global market in 2020 with a 50 percent market share, Precedence said, as industrialization in China led to rapidly increasing petrochemical consumption.