Once a wonderful invention, PLASTICS are now a detriment to life on Earth

From the Hesperian Health Guides, S.W. Penna. Environmental Health Project, et al.

Join speakers from the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project and the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives for a discussion about the connections between fracking and plastic production and disposal, and how raising awareness about harmful health impacts can strengthen local and global struggles against this chain of extractive processes.

This webinar is organized by the Extractive Industry Circle of the People’s Health Movement (PHM), a global network of activists opposing extractive industries, and Hesperian Health Guides, a non-profit publisher of health information and education materials to support people in their struggles to realize the right to health.

​Click here to register for the webinar and receive the Zoom link.​

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See also: “The Story of Plastic” — Trailer – YouTube

A detailed look into the environmental damage and human rights abuses that occur throughout the lifecycle of plastic. What companies, countries and people can do to fix the issues.

Will a push for plastics turn Appalachia into next ‘Cancer Alley’?

From an Article by Emily Holden, The Guardian, October 11, 2019

Critics say ethane expansion will not only prolong fracking but could also trigger a public health disaster.

Construction cranes climb into the sky and sprawl across the massive petrochemical facility that will turn a byproduct of fracked gas into plastic on the banks of the Ohio River, just outside Pittsburgh. Even at a distance, from the car park of a cancer treatment centre on a nearby hilltop, Royal Dutch Shell’s 386-acre site is a behemoth. It will anchor yet more gas, plastics and chemicals infrastructure in the tristate region of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

The plant would solidify demand for fracked natural gas and the ethane that comes with it out of the ground. It would make 1.6m tons of plastic and 2.2m tons of globe-heating carbon dioxide annually – roughly the same amount the city of Pittsburgh is trying to eliminate. The facility would also release hundreds of tons of toxic compounds into the air.

As global demand for plastics grows, the buildout of this industry threatens US progress on the climate crisis and clean air.

Opponents say the vast plastics industry will prolong fracking, even after power companies shift further towards renewable power, such as solar and wind. “To me, it’s so obvious that they are trying to lock us into fossil fuels,” said Terrie Baumgardner, a member of the Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community.

At a time when scientists warn humans must stop pulling fossil fuels out of the ground and spewing plastics into the environment, natural gas drilling is booming in Appalachia and the ethane-to-plastics industry there is just getting started.

In a tall office building on a hazy Pittsburgh day, Matt Mehalik, the executive director of a public health collaboration called the Breathe Project, slammed his hand on a table. “This region has been down this path before and we should know better,” he said. “I grew up in Pittsburgh at the time the steel industry unravelled. It has taken 30 years to recover.”

Dangerous air is already present and more coming

Opposed residents have myriad concerns. The Shell ethane facility, or “cracker” plant, would use extreme heat to turn ethane into ethylene, which becomes the polyethylene in plastic bottles, bags and food packaging. It will be fed by thousands of fracking wells that dot local communities, including next to day-care facilities and school bus stops.

Pipelines run under neighbourhoods that have previously been affected by explosions and fires. Trucks overwhelm the roads.

Residents opposing the ever-growing expansion say they worry about illnesses and dozens of cases of rare cancers they never saw in generations past.

Pittsburgh already has some of the most dangerous air in America. The city received a double-F rating from the American Lung Association for smog and particle pollution from fossil fuels. And Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, has ranked in the top 2% for cancer risks from air pollution.

And a report by the Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania last year found that since 2007, companies profiting from fracking had spent nearly $70m lobbying the state government, in part to insist the method was safe.

“Fracking money has undermined the voice of the people in comparison to the voice of the desire for fracking in the region,” said Mark Dixon, a film-maker and activist.

The pro-business group the Allegheny Conference on Community Development has boasted the plastics boom could turn Appalachia into a petrochemical hub similar to the Gulf Coast. But there, Louisiana residents have long tried to draw attention to the stretch of communities between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as “Cancer Alley”.

The conference argues its goal is to attract business and that government regulators are responsible for keeping residents healthy. A spokesman, Philip Cynar, said: “We have to think about the holistic approach … we can do a lot more for the overall benefit of the region if we have a good economy.”

The fear of health risks is misplaced, according to Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. In consultation with US regulators, it approved Shell’s air pollution plan in 2015. Allegheny County’s health department considered the effects of the plant’s releases of benzene, toluene, hexane, formaldehyde and ammonia – which cause cancer and other serious health problems. The department found the levels would be “well below the health-based risk value” for an individual.

Shell has said it designed the facility to “obtain the lowest achievable emissions.”

Aside from air pollution, the Shell plant will be as bad for global heating as putting a further 424,000 cars on the road each year. “It’s a huge paradox,” said Grant Ervin, Pittsburgh’s chief resilience officer. Oil and gas jobs pay well, even for people straight out of high school, he said. But the climate crisis puts humans “at the precipice of a public health disaster.”

Job creation has been a priority

Republicans and Democrats have supported the Shell plant, saying it will bring work to an area that has been hit hard by a downturn in US-made steel and coal.

Shell says it will create 6,000 construction jobs in the short term and 600 over the longer term. It is unclear exactly how many will go to locals. State lawmakers offered the company a $1.65bn, 25-year tax cut, the biggest break in Pennsylvania history.

Republican legislators have proposed a package of bills to encourage the natural gas industry, including by speeding the process for permitting projects and providing huge financial incentives.

Pennsylvania’s governor, the Democrat Tom Wolf, inherited the project from a Republican predecessor and now supports it.

But the facility and others like it are antithetical to Wolf’s plans to shrink the climate footprint of Pennsylvania, the country’s fourth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide. He wants to cut carbon pollution in Pennsylvania 26% by 2025, and 80% by 2050. His Department of Environmental Protection said the state is requiring the plant to reduce its climate footprint as possible “to help ensure that economic development and environmental protection can go hand in hand.”

Pittsburgh’s mayor, the Democrat Bill Peduto, famously challenged Trump on climate change, saying Pittsburgh would abide by an international pledge to limit heat-trapping pollution, even if Trump would not. But Peduto has stayed silent about the plant.

Construction continues (temporary stop work underway)

Hailed by Barack Obama as a “bridge fuel”, natural gas has become a nightmare for climate advocates. It has spurred a transition from coal, which emits twice as much carbon dioxide. But the bridge does not seem to be ending, and the natural gas production process leaks methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

The industry has continued to build wells, plants and pipelines – about 27% of natural gas in the US comes from the Marcellus and Utica shales under Appalachia. By 2040, the area will produce 37% of the country’s natural gas, according to the data firm IHS Markit.

Appalachia has wet gas, meaning it produces both the methane mixture that is used for power and stovetops and natural gas liquids, including ethane and propane. Drillers want a local market at which to sell them all.

Of the Democratic frontrunners for president, senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have pledged to ban fracking. Joe Biden, the former vice-president, has not. But the Trump administration is supporting the build-out.

Ken Humphreys, a senior adviser for regional economic development at the US Department of Energy, said: “Broadly this is about creating the conditions for private capital to flow into the region.

Between 2018 and 2040, the US’s capacity for making ethylene and intermediate petrochemical products is expected to nearly double. The energy department argues that global demand for plastic is rising, and it will either be produced in the US or in countries with more lax environmental standards.

Humphreys said there were 7,500 businesses within 300 miles of Pittsburgh, employing 900,000 people to make products that incorporated petrochemicals – most of which came from the Gulf Coast. Producing plastic locally would be more efficient, the department said.

Rare cancers in southwestern Pennsylvania

In Washington County, Pennsylvania, south-west of Pittsburgh, fracking well pads sit alongside neighbourhoods. One, called a super-frack pad because of its dozens of wellheads, sits in a valley next to the former coal community of Marianna.

A school bus stop overlooks the site and the children who wait there each morning live in brick homes that were built for coalminers and then abandoned.

Four counties in south-western Pennsylvania have been afflicted by a rash of rare cancers, including 27 cases of Ewing sarcoma over 10 years in a population of about 750,000. The bone cancer usually occurs in children and young adults.

A retired paediatrician, Ned Ketyer, said: “Ewing sarcoma is a nightmare for the families that are given that diagnosis, and certainly for the patients and also for the physicians that diagnose it. It starts very quietly but by the time the diagnosis is made it has deepened and spread.”

There are dozens of other rare cancer cases in the area too. The Pennsylvania Department of Health studied rates of the disease in two school districts and said there was no evidence of a cluster.

But people are still worried. Last week, 50 environmental advocacy and public health groups as well as hundreds of individuals signed a letter to the Pennsylvania governor asking him to attend a public meeting to hear their health concerns. The state’s epidemiologist attended instead.

The region has a toxic legacy that predates natural gas – including hundreds of years of coal-mining and agriculture pesticide use. But Ketyer said the cancers did not begin until fracking arrived.

Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection found the Shell plant’s hazardous air pollutants–which cause cancer and other serious sicknesses–“will not threaten public health and safety,” spokesman Neil Shader said.

Residents also worry about gas industry accidents. One September morning in 2018, Karen Gdula awoke to an explosion and flames shooting into the air from a 24-inch pipeline buried a few houses away. Her neighbours narrowly escaped with several of their dogs, but they lost their home, another dog and four cats in the fire.

Another neighbour, who was celebrating her birthday, had trouble convincing an emergency services operator that the pipeline had exploded until the operator heard the fire roar. The flames were so hot they melted a nearby transmission tower.

A second pipeline is under construction that will cross over the one that exploded. Gdula has been working with the construction company to make it safer for the neighbourhood. “My goal is safety,” she said. “We don’t believe we can stop them but we can do what we can to be safe.”

Global climate change

Natural gas from shale – the type that is extracted with fracking – is expected to double in the US in the coming decades, mostly in the east, according to the US Energy Information Administration. And the energy department expects an enormous 20-fold surge in ethane production in the eastern US by 2025.

Scientists say to avoid catastrophe from rising temperatures, people must rapidly reduce their emissions from fossil fuels to net zero by 2050.

The world is already 1C hotter than before industrialisation, and it is on track to warm an additional 2C – worsening extreme weather and poverty and leading to rapidly rising seas.

The Center for International Environmental Law, a pro-environment group, estimates that by 2050 climate-harming emissions from the production and incineration of plastics could reach 56 gigatons per year, or 10-13% of the budget allowed for keeping temperatures from rising more than 1.5C.

There is no way of knowing how much a plastics hub in Appalachia will exacerbate global warming and offset the work of states and cities trying to cut heat-trapping emissions. The ethane boom will, however, stretch beyond western Pennsylvania into Ohio and West Virginia.

In nearby Barnesville, Jill Hunkler said she was driven from her home by fracking. As gas wells were constructed around her, Hunkler said she started to experience headaches, breathing problems, burning eyes and a metallic taste in her mouth.

Hunkler counts 78 producing wells within five miles of her house, according to data from FracTracker. “There’s just no respect for the local community’s health,” she claimed.

Bev Reed, a nursing graduate and intern at the Sierra Club, a grassroots environmental organisation, said the community had no say over whether the facility was built.

“We already know it’s not sustainable and that Appalachia has been pillaged and plundered and raped for pretty much as long as its existed,” Reed said. “We’ve seen enough and we deserve better.”

…… Support the Guardian newspaper for its detailed investigative reporting, as it only takes a minute. Thank you.

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See also: The Ohio River Defines the Borders of Five States—But Its Pollution Doesn’t Stop at State Lines, Susan Cosier, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), August 21, 2019

In a move that could open the door to industrial waste and interstate squabbles, the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission is making its water quality standards voluntary.

[The Ohio River consistently is ranked as the most polluted in the country, with an estimated 30 million pounds of toxic chemicals illegally dumped into its waters each year.] dgn

‘Cancer Alley’ on Mississippi River in Louisiana

From an Article by Elaine Schattner, National Public Radio, July 12, 2019

PHOTO: A stretch of the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, La., that is crowded with chemical plants has been called “Cancer Alley” because of the health problems there.

We already know how to stop many cancers before they start, scientists say. But there’s a lot more work to be done.

“Around half of cancers could be prevented,” said Christopher Wild in the opening session of an international scientific meeting on cancer’s environmental causes held in June. Wild is the former director of the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer.

“Cancer biology and treatment is where most of the money goes,” he said, but prevention warrants greater attention. “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t work to improve treatment, but we haven’t balanced it properly.”

Perhaps no question about cancer is more contentious than its causes. People wonder, and scientists debate, if most malignancies stem from random DNA mutations and other chance events or from exposure to carcinogens, or from behaviors that might be avoided.

At the conference in Charlotte, N.C., scientists pressed for a reassessment of the role of environmental exposures by applying modern molecular techniques to toxicology. They called for more aggressive collection of examples of human pathology and environmental samples, including water and air, so that cellular responses to chemicals can be elucidated.

The hope is that by identifying specific traces of exposures in human cancer specimens, scientists can identify environmental causes of disease that might be prevented.

“Over 80,000 chemicals are used in the United States, but only a few have been tested for carcinogenic activity,” said Margaret Kripke, an immunologist and professor emeritus at MD Anderson Cancer Center, in an interview at the meeting.

“This has been a very neglected area of cancer research for the last several decades,” said Kripke, the driving force behind the conference, which was put on by the American Association for Cancer Research. “Environmental toxicology was very popular in the 1950s and 1960s,” she said, but genetics then began to overshadow studies of cancer’s environmental causes. “Toxicology fell by the wayside.”

While the incidence of tobacco-linked cancers has been falling, malignancies not associated with smoking are rising, Kripke said. Recent evidence suggests an escalating rate of lung cancer in nonsmokers. That trend implicates other environmental factors.

Around the globe, cancer’s overall incidence is climbing. This year, 18 million people will be diagnosed with some form of cancer and over 9 million will die from it.

Infections — many preventable, such as by human papillomavirus —account for 15% of new cases.

Another rising cause is obesity, along with urbanization. People generally get less physical activity and eat differently in cities, and pollution is heavier there, too. “As people move into cities, that will drive up cancer rates,” Wild said.

One of the biggest obstacles to preventing cancer is that many people just don’t think it’s feasible. Progress “requires long-term vision and commitment,” Wild said. “Funding is limited, and there’s little private sector investment.”

A change in the way benefits of cancer prevention are framed could help. “When I was at the IARC, one thing that struck me was the power of economic arguments over health arguments for preventing cancer,” Wild said.

Cancer treatment costs can be prohibitive. But productivity lost from premature deaths in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa alone runs $46.3 Abillion annually, he said. “Developing countries are not prepared to deal with the rising cancer burden.”

The precise proportion of cancers arising from environmental and occupational exposure to carcinogens is uncertain. In 2009, a report by the President’s Cancer Panel called prior approximations of around 6% “woefully out of date” and low. A 2015 paper by over a hundred concerned scientists cited “credible” estimates of 7% to 19%.

Scientist at the Charlotte meeting emphasized the complexity of cancer’s causes and the need for toxicologists to update methods to reflect that complexity, such as by studying interactions of environmental and genetic risks, and by examining cells after a mix of exposures. “Most toxic exposures do not occur singly,” said Rick Woychik, deputy director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Until recently, many toxicology tests were performed in rodents, because it would be unethical to deliberately evaluate possible carcinogens in people. But these animal experiments are labor-intensive and slow, he said.

New alternatives are now being tried. “We learned from pharma that with robotics and high-throughput technology you can interrogate a lot of biology quickly and at lower costs,” he said.

Epidemiological research of human exposures has been stymied by the difficulty of proving cause-and-effect — that a particular substance actually causes cancer — and by shortcomings of survey data from questionnaires.

At the conference, scientists offered glimpses of new technology that is helping fill informational gaps.

Bogdan Fedeles of MIT explained how DNA serves as a lifelong “recording device.” He and others use duplex sequencing to examine human samples for genetic “fingerprints of exposure.”

Allan Balmain, a geneticist at University of California, San Francisco, spoke about mutational signatures in malignancies. In liver cancer, for instance, these signatures can offer causal clues—such as smoking, alcohol or aflatoxin, a product of mold that grows on some foods.

Many chemicals that cause or stimulate cancer growth are produced inside our bodies. “It’s not all about the environment,” Balmain said.

Others highlighted a conceptual shift in how scientists define carcinogens. Key characteristics may include a substance’s capacity to stimulate growth of malignant cells, or to induce inflammation—without necessarily causing DNA damage, long seen as the necessary.

“The answer to ‘What is a carcinogen?’ is changing” said Ruthann Rudel, a toxicologist at the Silent Spring Institute who has published extensively on breast carcinogens. She detailed new techniques to screen breast cancer cells for changes in response to specific chemical exposures.

The public health stakes for the field are high.

Professor Polly Hoppin, of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, discussed cancer-causing industrial contamination of drinking water at Camp Lejune, N.C., air pollution in St. John the Baptist Parish, La., and potential exposures to carcinogens from fracking and planned plastics production in Pennsylvania.

Hoppin reflected on the U.S. experience with tobacco cessation. Scientists knew that smoking causes cancer by the 1950s, she said. Implementing that knowledge required policy and incentives — like high cigarette taxes and public smoking bans — and took decades.

“The science wasn’t enough,” Hoppin said. “How many lives could have been saved if we’d acted sooner?”

>>> Elaine Schattner is a physician in New York writing a book on cancer attitudes that will be published by Columbia University Press.

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See Also: Louisiana’s Cancer Alley Residents Take the Fight for Environmental Justice on the Road | DeSmogBlog, July 8, 2019

Dustin White of OVEC speaks at press conference

Contacts: Dustin White, OVEC-Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, 304-541-3144, dustin@ohvec.org; Deb Smit, Breathe Project, 412-760-7677

MORGANTOWN, W.Va.—Today more than 50 people representing more than a dozen grassroots groups from West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania gathered to show their opposition to the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub, a petrochemical mega-complex build-out proposed for the Ohio and Kanawha river valleys.

The group gathered outside the Marriott at Waterfront Place as the West Virginia Manufacturers Association was hosting the Marcellus and Manufacturing Development Conference, where the Hub was to be a main topic.

Among those gathered was Melcroft, Pa., resident Ashley Funk, a community organizer for Mountain Watershed Association, who said, “We are standing together to show the shale gas and petrochemical industries that, unlike the plastics from which they want to profit, our communities are not disposable.”

The end products of a Hub would be plastics, and its feedstock would come from an increase in regional fracking, which is already wreaking havoc in some north-central West Virginia counties. The infrastructure related to a Hub would stretch along more than 400 miles of the Ohio and Kanawha rivers, and reach into 50 counties in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky.

A Hub would include underground storage caverns for volatile natural gas liquids, six major pipelines (new pipelines in the region have already exploded*, resulting in destroyed buildings including a home, property damage, livestock deaths and evacuations), thousands of miles of feeder pipelines, and huge polluting factories including fractionators and cracker plants, like the one being built in Beaver County, Pa.**

“It is of upmost importance that people see these current and proposed petrochemical projects in Appalachia for what they are: a scheme that the oil and gas companies are using to bail themselves out of debt. Appalachia has been exploited enough. Every stage of the life-cycle of plastic is toxic and harmful to human health and the environment—from the extraction of the natural gas liquids to the manufacture and use of the products, to the disposal of them. The tide needs to shift to alternatives to plastic, rather than creating more,” said Bridgeport, Ohio, resident, Bev Reed, who attended today’s event. She lives near the site of one component of the Hub, the planned PTTG ethane cracker plant.

Participants in the protest worried about the human health aspects of the Hub. They spoke about the warnings they are receiving from their allies who live in petrochemical regions of Louisiana and Texas known as “Cancer Alley,” and cited the recent petrochemical fires near Houston as reason enough to question the proposed Hub. They talked about Bayou Corne sinkhole, an ongoing incident in Assumption Parish, La., where residents who had been living near a collapsing storage cavern operated by Texas Brine Company and owned by Occidental Petroleum have been evacuated.

Due to the direct human health impacts and the potential for deadly and costly disasters, participants in today’s protest questioned the wisdom of government loans and tax breaks aimed at facilitating the construction of components of the Hub. Given the likelihood of a dramatic increase in regional greenhouse gas emissions from Hub-related infrastructure, participants also questioned the sanity of the Hub.

“It’s nuts for our state to bow down to another round of abuse from fossil fuel corporations,” said Dustin White, project coordinator with OVEC, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, which is based in Huntington, W.Va. “We deserve a diverse and sustainable, community-led economy that is not dependent on fossil fuels with all the associated health and safety risks. Workers deserve better than more toxic jobs.

“The ASH scheme is an unimaginative regression to 1950s era economic development. Why can’t we have real innovation? Development focused on tourism and cottage industries could allow our area to be part of real progress, toward a world we’d want our grandchildren to live in,” White added.

“West Virginia is commonly referred to as ‘almost heaven’ and I could not think of a better way to describe it myself. The places and people here are what makes West Virginia like no other, and for far too long large corporations have plundered our beautiful land and harmed its people,” said Abby Minihan with WVU Sierra Student Coalition. Another coalition member, Ethan Cade, added, “As a young West Virginian, I can say that we are tired of dealing with the negative economic, environmental, and health consequences of corporate pollution and are coming out to fight for a cleaner, better West Virginia.”

“Our oceans are drowning in plastic waste. According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, up to 1 million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die each year from eating our plastic garbage,” said Brenda Jo McManama, a campaign organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network. “Recycling has become a convenient myth as facilities shut down across the U.S., and other countries close their ports to our garbage. We are literally burying our future in discarded plastic. We are here to demand: No more plastics, no more petro over people! Greed and hubris is destroying any hope of a healthy and safe future for the generations to come.”

Groups involved in the planning of this event include OVEC-the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Concerned Ohio River Residents, Indigenous Environmental Network, Sierra Club WV, Sierra Club OH, Center for Coalfield Justice, Breathe Project, Mountain Watershed Association, and Climate Reality Project: Pittsburgh.

*For April 2, 2019 aerial photos of the site of September 10, 2019 Center Township, Pa., pipeline explosion

**For April 2, 2019 aerial photos of the Beaver County, Pa. Shell cracker plant construction site on the Ohio River

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For more photos and an article on the Morgantown conference see:

WV MetroNews Downstream opportunities touted at annual Marcellus and Manufacturing Development Conference. – WV MetroNews

Natural gas liquids (NGL) projects and plans in the Marcellus - Utica region

From an Update of Kallanish Energy News, March 22, 2019

NORTH CANTON, Ohio — Ohio-based Marathon Petroleum is exploring the possibility of an underground liquids storage facility in eastern Ohio’s Utica Shale, Kallanish Energy reports.

The company is looking at utilizing underground salt caverns for ethane, butane and propane storage, said Jason Stechschulte, commercial development manager for Marathon Pipe Line LLC. The site would be near the company’s Hopedale fractionation facility in Harrison County.

Core samplings in 2018 looks promising

The company last year conducted core sampling and the site has potential, he said Thursday at the day-long Utica Midstream conference sponsored by the Canton Regional Chamber of Commerce and Shale Directories. The event drew roughly 130 people to Walsh University in North Canton.

Marathon is talking with potential customers, but there are no firm plans, price estimates or timetables, Stechschulte said. Any timetable would be driven by customer interest and permitting, he said. He described the plan as a “multi-year project.” No applications have been filed for the project, except for the coring work done in 2018.

What the company is envisioning is a storage facility that would provide a solution for the entre industry in the Appalachian Basin, he said. Natural gas liquids would be stored under pressure with the ethane, butane and propane all being segregated in different salt caverns, he said.

The facility would be close to numerous pipelines in the area where Ohio, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania come together. Storage is needed as Shell Appalachia continues to build its ethane cracker plant at Monaca, Pennsylvania, northwest of Pittsburgh.

Waiting on PTT Cracker in the Ohio River valley —-

PTT Global Chemical is still looking at building a similar cracker at Dilles Bottom in Ohio’s Belmont County. A final investment decision has been expected for some time.

A private company, Colorado-based Mountaineer NGL Storage, hopes to develop a storage facility in salt caverns at Clarington in Ohio’s Monroe County. It would be designed to handle up to 3.5 million barrels of natural gas liquids. Natural gas liquids are also flowing via pipelines to eastern Pennsylvania for export.

Rio Pipeline work wrapping up —-

In other news, Marathon Pipeline is completing the finishing touches to expanding its Rio Pipeline to move Utica Shale liquids from Lima, Ohio, to Robinson, Illinois. That required adding three pumping stations on the 250-mile, eight-inch line.

Stechschulte told the audience the pipeline will move roughly 55,000 barrels per day, starting within the next 10 days. The company is also working to move Utica normal butane and isobutane to refineries and storage in the Midwest, a project that will be completed by mid-2020. The two projects together will cost Marathon about $150 million, he said.

The company is also looking at a possible arrangement to move Utica liquids from Cadiz and Scio in eastern Ohio, to Bells Run on the Ohio River for river transport, he said. That might be an arranged in cooperation with EnLink Midstream.

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See also: New Warnings on Plastic’s Health Risks as Fracking Industry Promotes New ‘Plastics Belt’ Build-Out, Resilience & DeSmog Blog, March 5, 2019