Plans to fully capitalize on the motherlode of natural gas in our region are moving ahead in fits and starts.
Just this week, Royal Dutch Shell subsidiary Shell Chemical Appalachia announced it “has taken the final investment decision to build a major petrochemical complex.” The “cracker” plant site is in southwestern Pennsylvania, just a few miles from the northern panhandle of West Virginia.
The “cracker” will convert ethane from shale gas to make 1.6 million tons annually of polyethylene, a high-demand product that’s used in everything from food packaging and containers to automotive parts.
Brian Anderson, director of the Energy Institute at WVU, says West Virginia will benefit from the project. “There is certainly an opportunity for the jobs that will be created,” he told me on Talkline this week. “People that live in the northern panhandle can easily commute. There will be jobs there, both construction jobs in the near term as well as long term chemical jobs.”
Meanwhile, there’s also progress on a planned “cracker” plant on the other side of the Ohio River in Belmont County, Ohio. Crews are clearing a 500 acre site and PTT Global Chemical America has contracted engineering work.
However, the Thai company is still evaluating the feasibility. “PTT Global Chemical America’s decision will be based upon the cost and operational analysis we receive from the firms performing the front-end engineering design,” said company CEO Toasaporn Boonyapipat.
Like the Pennsylvania plant, the Ohio project would mean thousands of construction jobs and hundreds of good-paying permanent jobs.
The proposed West Virginia cracker plant does not appear to be moving ahead as quickly at the other two. “The final decision is on hold,” Commerce Secretary Keith Burdette said on Talkline Wednesday, adding, “But on hold doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.”
The ASCENT project in Wood County was announced with much fanfare in 2013 by two global companies, Odebrecht and Braskem, but progress has been slow because of, among other things, dramatic changes in the energy market. Additionally, just last month Odebrecht announced it was pulling out of the project.
The trade publication Valor International reported that “Despite Odebrecht’s suspension of its participation in ASCENT, Braskem said it would continue to evaluate the project’s potential, taking into consideration the current energy scenario.”
Currently, our region is losing out on most of the downstream economic benefits of our huge supplies of natural gas. Either the ethane is left in the natural gas and piped out for power generation or it’s shipped to crackers in other parts of the county, particularly the gulf coast.
We’ll never fully capitalize on the growth potential here until one or all of these three crackers reaches fruition.