Petrochemical plant finally gets cracking
Long wait ends at Shell site
Shell Chemical’s Beaver County petrochemical complex is now operational, the company announced Tuesday, capping a decade of anticipation.
The sprawling facility on the Ohio River in Potter Township is now turning the natural gas liquid ethane, plucked from Appalachian shales, into lentil-sized plastic pellets.
Shell spent the past six years and more than $6 billion building the plant, which now employs about 600 workers. Since the company announced plans for an ethane cracker in the region, the project has enjoyed the support of several governors and was granted more than $1.6 billion in public incentives. At the peak of construction, there were about 8,000 workers on site.
“This plant is the largest investment in Pennsylvania since the mid-century and one of the largest of its kind in North America,” Hilary Mercer, senior vice president at Shell Polymers, wrote on Facebook Tuesday
morning to mark the occasion and thank the thousands of people who made it possible.
Typically, when a regulated facility is ready to start up, the state Department of Environmental Protection will perform an initial operating permit inspection. But because of the size of Shell’s facility and, more precisely, the number of emission sources there, the DEP began these inspection activities months ago, in phases.
Shell had always said that going into commercial operations wouldn’t be the kind of event obvious to the naked eye. Its large metal towers have been exhaling steam for months, its flares lighting the sky on and off for as long. The wastewater plant and a 250-megawatts natural gas power plant on-site have been operating since last year.
“The systems and infrastructure are already producing product,” Shell spokesman Curtis Thomas said Tuesday. “Along the way, we’re checking and double-checking system integrity, tweaking and making steady progress toward full production.”
The full production goal of 3.5 billion pounds of polyethylene pellets a year is expected to be reached in the second half of 2023. The complex will ship its products to customers that will then turn those pellets into specialty films, pipe, blowmolded containers and injection-molded parts.
Stefani Pashman, CEO of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, said the project “demonstrates the power of placing big bets that position the Pittsburgh region for the future.”
“From the world-class facility that is operational today to a commitment to ensuring the region secures a leadership position in decarbonization via carbon capture and clean hydrogen, Shell, under the leadership of Hilary Mercer and Bill Watson, is a valuable partner in the economic future and quality of life for our 10county region,” she said.
Shell, which built its plant on 384 acres of the 700 acres it secured for the project, has said there is room on its campus and nearby to capture the CO2 emitted at the plant and at other facilities across the region and pump it underground for long-term storage. The company has partnered with Equinor, a Norwegian energy firm, in pursuing a carbon capture, storage and hydrogen hub here.
The two submitted their intentions to the U.S. Department of Energy earlier this month and the state has blessed the concept as Pennsylvania’s entry into the competition for $8 billion in federal funding for such hubs. The state has declined to make the proposal public.
Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration marked the occasion of Shell’s announcement on Tuesday by recalling that the governor called the petrochemical project a “game changer” 2016, when Shell made the decision to invest in it.
“And he’s absolutely right,” said Neil Weaver, acting secretary for the state’s Department of Community and Economic Development. “This project is really going to bolster the economy in Western Pennsylvania.”
The plant is becoming operational at a time of heightened concern about greenhouse gas emissions — the world’s leading economies are currently meeting at Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, at 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
It is permitted to emit 2.2 million tons per year of carbon dioxide equivalent and will be the leading source of emissions of volatile organic compounds in the Pittsburgh region.
Some environmental groups that fought to block the plant marked the occasion of the announcement with a call to vigilance.
“Our razor focus now shifts to monitoring the pollution coming into the community and fighting them everyday from this day forward as we have been!” the Breathe Project tweeted.
The Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community, which organized the “Eyes on Shell” community monitoring network, put out a call for more “watchdogs.”