AIR POLLUTION & RESPIRATORY INFECTIONS SUCH AS COVID-19

From the Newsletter of the Environmental Health Project, Summer, Issue 6, June 2020

EHP has been taking an active look at the connection between air pollution and respiratory infections such as COVID-19. What we’re finding is a stronger relationship than you might imagine. As our blog post “Air Pollution and Respiratory Infections: Q & A” notes, if you’ve been exposed to air pollution and you contract a respiratory infection, your symptoms may be more severe.

“A number of scientific studies have shown a link between air pollution and respiratory infections,” said EHP’s public health nurse Sarah Rankin, MPH, RN. “These studies show that being exposed to air pollution may aid in making a respiratory infection worse. It might also increase your chances of getting a respiratory infection in the first place.”

Naturally, at EHP, we want to offer ways you can help to protect your health and your family’s health from the effects of pollution in your air. The Q & A blog post talks about how you can monitor the air in and around your home and suggests steps you can take to reduce pollution there. Along those lines, EHP has produced a short video explaining how to make an affordable and effective air filter using a box fan and a HEPA-certified furnace filter. This DIY fan/furnace filter can help to make your home’s air cleaner.

If you want to take a deeper dive into the science behind the relationship between air pollution and respiratory infection, you might be interested in EHP’s review of the studies mentioned above. “Air Pollution and Respiratory Infections: Reviewing the Science” looks at more than two dozen research studies that tackle the issue from the standpoint of disease severity, hospitalizations and emergency room visits, and deaths during pandemics, including COVID-19.

Feel free to contact EHP for more information on air pollution as it affects your health and well-being.

Wind farms are already operating in the Allegheny Highlands of WV

From an Article by Tara Lohan, The Revelator, May 30, 2020

The first official tallies are in: Coronavirus-related shutdowns helped slash daily global emissions of carbon dioxide by 14 percent in April. But the drop won’t last, and experts estimate that annual emissions of the greenhouse gas are likely to fall only about 7 percent this year.

After that, unless we make substantial changes to global economies, it will be back to business as usual — and a path that leads directly to runaway climate change. If we want to reverse course, say the world’s leading scientists, we have about a decade to right the ship.

That’s because we’ve squandered a lot of time. “The 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s were lost decades for preventing global climate disaster,” political scientist Leah Stokes writes in her new book Short Circuiting Policy, which looks at the history of clean energy policy in the U.S.

But we don’t all bear equal responsibility for the tragic delay.

“Some actors in society have more power than others to shape how our economy is fueled,” writes Stokes, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “We are not all equally to blame.”

This book Short Circuiting Policy focuses on the role of one particularly bad actor: electric utilities. Their history of obstructing a clean-energy transition in the U.S. has been largely overlooked, with most of the finger-pointing aimed at fossil fuel companies (and for good reason).

We spoke with Stokes about this history of delay and denial from the utility industry, how to accelerate the speed and scale of clean-energy growth, and whether we can get past the polarizing rhetoric and politics around clean energy.

QUESTION — What lessons can we learn from your research to guide us right now, in what seems like a really critical time in the fight to halt climate change?

PROF. STOKES — What a lot of people don’t understand is that to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we actually have to reduce emissions by around 7-8 percent every single year from now until 2030, which is what the emissions drop is likely to be this year because of the COVID-19 crisis.

So think about what it took to reduce emissions by that much and think about how we have to do that every single year.

It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be some big sacrifice, but it does mean that we need government policy, particularly at the federal level, because state policy can only go so far. We’ve been living off state policy for more than three decades now and we need our federal government to act.

Where are we now, in terms of our progress on renewable energy and how far we need to go?

A lot of people think renewable energy is growing “so fast” and it’s “so amazing.” But first of all, during the coronavirus pandemic, the renewable energy industry is actually doing very poorly. It’s losing a lot of jobs. And secondly, we were not moving fast enough even before the coronavirus crisis, because renewable energy in the best year grew by only 1.3 percent.

Right now we’re at around 36-37 percent clean energy. That includes nuclear, hydropower and new renewables like wind, solar and geothermal. But hydropower and nuclear aren’t growing. Nuclear supplies about 20 percent of the grid and hydro about 5 percent depending on the year. And then the rest is renewable. So we’re at about 10 percent renewables, and in the best year, we’re only adding 1 percent to that.

Generally, we need to be moving about eight times faster than we’ve been moving in our best years. (To visualize this idea, I came up with the narwhal curve.)

QUESTION — How do we overcome these fundamental issues of speed and scale?

PROF. STOKES — We need actual government policy that supports it. We have never had a clean electricity standard or renewable portfolio standard at the federal level. That’s the main law that I write all about at the state level. Where those policies are in place, a lot of progress has been made — places like California and even, to a limited extent, Texas.

We need our federal government to be focusing on this crisis. Even the really small, piecemeal clean-energy policies we have at the federal level are going away. In December Congress didn’t extend the investment tax credit and the production tax credit, just like they didn’t extend or improve the electric vehicle tax credit.

And now during the COVID-19 crisis, a lot of the money going toward the energy sector in the CARES Act is going toward propping up dying fossil fuel companies and not toward supporting the renewable energy industry.

So we are moving in the wrong direction.

QUESTION— Clean energy hasn’t always been such a partisan issue. Why did it become so polarizing?

PROF. STOKES— What I argue in my book, with evidence, is that electric utilities and fossil fuel companies have been intentionally driving polarization. And they’ve done this in part by running challengers in primary elections against Republicans who don’t agree with them.

Basically, fossil fuel companies and electric utilities are telling Republicans that you can’t hold office and support climate action. That has really shifted the incentives within the party in a very short time period.

It’s not like the Democrats have moved so far left on climate. The Democrats have stayed in pretty much the same place and the Republicans have moved to the right. And I argue that that’s because of electric utilities and fossil fuel companies trying to delay action.

And their reason for doing that is simply about their bottom line and keeping their share of the market?

Exactly. You have to remember that delay and denial on climate change is a profitable enterprise for fossil fuel companies and electric utilities. The longer we wait to act on the crisis, the more money they can make because they can extract more fossil fuels from their reserves and they can pay more of their debt at their coal plants and natural gas plants. So delay and denial is a money-making business for fossil fuel companies and electric utilities.

There’s been a lot of research, reporting and even legal action in recent years about the role of fossil fuel companies in discrediting climate science. From reading your book, it seems that electric utilities are just as guilty. Is that right?

Yes, far less attention has been paid to electric utilities, which play a really critical role. They preside over legacy investments into coal and natural gas, and some of them continue to propose building new natural gas.

They were just as involved in promoting climate denial in the 1980s and 90s as fossil fuel companies, as I document in my book. And some of them, like Southern Company, have continued to promote climate denial to basically the present day.

But that’s not the only dark part of their history.

Electric utilities promoted energy systems that are pretty wasteful. They built these centralized fossil fuel power plants rather than having co-generation plants that were onsite at industrial locations where manufacturing is happening, and where you need both steam heat — which is a waste product from electricity — and the electricity itself. That actually created a lot of waste in the system and we burned a lot more fossil fuels than if we had a decentralized system.

The other thing they’ve done in the more modern period is really resisted the energy transition. They’ve resisted renewable portfolio standards and net metering laws that allow for more clean energy to come onto the grid. They’ve tried to roll them back. They’ve been successful in some cases, and they’ve blocked new laws from passing when targets were met.

QUESTION — You wrote that, “Partisan polarization on climate is not inevitable — support could shift back to the bipartisanship we saw before 2008.” What would it take to actually make that happen?

PROF. STOKES — Well, on the one hand, you need to get the Democratic Party to care more about climate change and to really understand the stakes. And if you want to do that, I think the work of the Justice Democrats is important. They have primary-challenged incumbent Democrats who don’t care enough about climate change. That is how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected. She was a primary challenger and she has really championed climate action in the Green New Deal.

The other thing is that the public supports climate action. Democrats do in huge numbers. Independents do. And to some extent Republicans do, particularly young Republicans.

So communicating the extent of public concern on these issues is really important because, as I’ve shown in other research, politicians don’t know how much public concern there is on climate change. They dramatically underestimate support for climate action.

I think the media has a really important role to play because it’s very rare that a climate event, like a disaster that is caused by climate change, is actually linked to climate change in media reporting.

But people might live through a wildfire or a hurricane or a heat wave, but nobody’s going to tell them through the media that this is climate change. So we really need our reporters to be doing a better job linking people’s lived experiences to climate change.

QUESTION — With economic stimulus efforts ramping up because of the COVD-19 pandemic, are we in danger of missing a chance to help boost a clean energy economy?

PROF. STOKES — I think so many people understand that stimulus spending is an opportunity to rebuild our economy in a way that creates good-paying jobs in the clean-energy sector that protects Americans’ health.

We know that breathing dirty air makes people more likely to die from COVID-19. So this is a big opportunity to create an economy that’s more just for all Americans.

But unfortunately, we really are not pivoting toward creating a clean economy, which is what we need to be doing. This is an opportunity to really focus on the climate crisis because we have delayed for more than 30 years. There is not another decade to waste.

Respiratory diseases result from particulates in the air we breathe

Essay by Juan Cole, Common Dreams, April 12, 2020

Air pollution, producing medical conditions such as asthma and other lung problems as well as heart disease, is responsible for some of the thousands of coronavirus deaths in the United States. This, according to a just-published Harvard study, which is well summarized by Matthew Yglesias of Vox. Yglesias notes that Trump’s response to the pandemic has been to abolish clean air regulation, which is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.

City-dwellers around the world are astonished to see how clean their air suddenly became once people stopped burning so many fossil fuels by driving gasoline vehicles for hours a day and powering stores with coal.

Clean air is not just a beautiful thing. It is necessary for our health. A study published last November in an open-access journal issued by the American Medical Association found that breathing polluted air full of small particulate matter kills some 200,000 people a year in the U.S. even where the level of pollution is below the limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency standards.

Particles or droplets less than 2.5 microns across, or thirty times smaller than a strand of hair, are implicated in a range of health disorders and even in declining intelligence in highly polluted environments.

In fact, the Guardian headline from 2018 was Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals. Damian Carrington and Lily Kuo wrote that breathing in polluted air so interferes with brain function that doing it regularly is like losing a year of education. I know people sometimes blow off their last semester of college, but apparently they lose both semesters if they live in a city with heavy air pollution. And that’s not counting full-blown dementia, in which dirty air caused by burning gasoline and coal is also implicated.

Rosie McCall at Newsweek pointed out that the JAMA Network study found that air pollution causes death from heart disease, obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, pneumonia, and type 2 diabetes, as well as brain damage caused by damaged blood vessels closing off oxygen to the brain. These six fatal diseases were known to be the result of breathing polluted air. But in addition, they were able to show that breathing in micro-particles over time also causes dementia, high blood pressure, and chronic kidney disease, all of which are also killing people.

Coal companies and Big Oil like ExxonMobil and all those fracking companies are thus killing off a million Americans every five years. For the past 20 years Americans have been freaking out about terrorism that might kill less than a hundred people a year, but they’ve been happy to have a fifth of a million of their fellow citizens polished off by the burning of fossil fuels annually.

The situation is, of course, much worse than this study shows. Because not only does driving gasoline cars and heating your home with coal make you stupid and sick, it is also wrecking the planet by spewing powerful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, where they trap the sun’s energy and won’t let it radiate back out into space, heating up the earth.

Global heating causes wildfires (which also throw up particulates into the air), drought, more severe hurricanes, and deadly sea rise and storm surges. Carbon dioxide is absorbed up to a certain limit by the sea, at the cost of making the sea acidic and threatening a huge kill-off of the fish on which 10% of humankind live.

The Scientific American reports that researchers estimate that some 150,000 people are being killed annually by the climate emergency around the world. The number is expected to double by 2030.

Proportionally speaking, the US is 4.2% of the world’s population, so a little over 6,000 Americans are already being killed annually by global heating. That number will mount exponentially through the 21st century.

The burden of all this disease and death is falling disproportionately on the poor and in the US on African-Americans, who are shunted by discrimination into the most polluted and least desirable housing. Who lives near a coal plant?

As huge numbers of new lines of affordable electric cars come online over the next five years, everyone who can afford one should go electric. As we green the electricity grid and phase out coal, the EVs will save the lives of literally hundreds of thousands of Americans a year, not to mention flattening the climate emergency curve for the next generation.

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See also: Exposure to air pollution and COVID-19 mortality in the United States (Updated April 5, 2020)

Xiao Wu MS, Rachel C. Nethery PhD, M. Benjamin Sabath MA, Danielle Braun PhD, Francesca Dominici PhD, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

Background: United States government scientists estimate that COVID-19 may kill between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans. The majority of the pre-existing conditions that increase the risk of death for COVID-19 are the same diseases that are affected by long-term exposure to air pollution. We investigate whether long-term average exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) increases the risk of COVID-19 deaths in the United States.

Conclusions: A small increase in long-term exposure to PM2.5 leads to a large increase in COVID-19 death rate, with the magnitude of increase 20 times that observed for PM2.5 and all-cause mortality. The study results underscore the importance of continuing to enforce existing air pollution regulations to protect human health both during and after the COVID-19 crisis.

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See also: Fine particulate air pollution and human mortality: 25+ years of cohort studies – ScienceDirect by CA Pope III, Nov 14, 2019 ·

Much of the key epidemiological evidence that long-term exposure to fine particulate matter air pollution (PM2.5) contributes to increased risk of mortality comes from survival studies of cohorts of individuals.

Congresswoman Kathy Castor visits the National Renewable Energy Laboratory

CURWOOD: Now, tell me first, what’s the status of your committee? Initially, it was set up by the the House leadership, by Nancy Pelosi, as a Select Committee, which means it doesn’t go on forever. And you were supposed to have a report by about this time of year; but of course, things have changed, huh?
CASTOR: Yes, unfortunately, we’re dealing with a life and death situation, the COVID-19 pandemic. Our Select Committee on the Climate Crisis framework for congressional climate action was actually due out last week, so we were bringing it in for a landing. But if anything has given me hope, when it comes to climate, it’s this massive mobilization across the planet to tackle this pandemic, this coronavirus, and that gives me hope that we will be able to attack the other, more slow-moving crisis, that’s the climate crisis.

CURWOOD: At this point, though, the nation is in the midst of this crisis, this pandemic crisis. Why is it is a good time to be thinking about climate change policy?
The $2 trillion stimulus package known as the CARES Act includes up to $16 billion to replenish the nation’s depleted stockpile of ventilators, medicines, and personal protective equipment, or PPE, shown here as members of the Florida National Guard assist hospital staff.
CASTOR: You know, I was born and raised in the State of Florida and it reminds me of a hurricane, and when a hurricane sweeps through and it destroys your community, it destroys your home, you build back on a stronger foundation. And that’s what we, we have to do going forward. The climate crisis is a public health crisis and our climate action plan that was going to be released last week, and will be released down the road, had some very strong recommendations for public health policy and how to keep our families safe and healthy, and then it spanned this entire spectrum. And I think folks will be very interested and focused on those solutions down the road. But first and foremost, it’s about helping our neighbors right now and those frontline heroes in hospitals and making sure we get the the personal protective equipment to deal with the here and now.

CURWOOD: What about support and the deadline extension for the clean energy tax credits, or aviation carbon limits that Democrats had sought in exchange for bailing out the airline industry? I mean, that didn’t make it into this most recent package that was passed.
CASTOR: No, but we’re gonna press to have it included in future packages. And a lot of those provisions related to aviation, yes, we could have done better. And they, in fact, a lot of the airline companies were in agreement on better aviation fuels and decarbonizing our airports. So I’m, I’m confident we’ll get there. But the first priority: making sure that those workers and all of those folks that work at airports get the lifeline that they need to make it through the stay at home orders.

CURWOOD: Now in terms of jobs and green energy jobs, both the solar folks and the wind folks are saying without the tax credits, they’re gonna be in trouble. What do you think Democrats are going to do about that?
CASTOR: Well, we’ve pressed hard, along with a lot of the Democratic senators to have those provisions included. I think if the Republicans and the administration had pressed forward on a bailout for oil and gas companies, or for refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, then the clean energy tax credits would have traveled along with them. So we have an opportunity now to start from a clean slate, and to make the case on building that strong foundation for how we want the economy to work in the future. It has to be more sustainable. We’ve got to be smarter with our public dollar investments, and that means in clean energy, in more resilient communities.

CURWOOD: So give us a preview, if you’re comfortable with that, of what’s going to be in this major report from the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. What are the main goal posts in your report, do you think?
CASTOR: I’m not going to get into too many details on it because we are, this gives us an opportunity to polish it. But clearly we’re charting a course for a clean energy future, one that provides an emphasis on what climate means for the health of your kids and your grandkids. I’m excited about the agriculture section, because going into this, I didn’t anticipate that the agriculture community and our food producers would be so engaged. But you know, the climate’s hurting them, desperately. Their, they can’t grow the same crops, their livestock is suffering. There are torrential floods that are flooding out their crop lands. So they want to be part of the solution. That means sequestering carbon, that means assistance from USDA and all those great agriculture extension offices, our universities. They want to figure out how they can grow their crops to be more sustainable, how they cover their crops to make them more productive. So I’m excited about that piece. I’m excited about our investment in science and research. I was able to travel to a number of clean energy labs, like the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, with the committee in a bipartisan way, and saw the, you know, you get a peek of what the future will be with how we build our buildings with solar, not just solar panels, but solar products that will go alongside buildings of the future. There are innovators that understand that our building materials have to change, that’s going to be a source of jobs of the future. Those are a few things I’d, I’d highlight, but, but stay tuned. We’re eager to get it out. But the health of the nation comes first. And that’s what we’re focused on now.

CURWOOD: So which of the climate policies that you’ve studied have proven to be the most controversial, or politically difficult as you’ve been working on your report?
CASTOR: Fortunately, there has been a lot of bipartisan ground that we’ve covered. But it’s still, the kicker still is the carbon pollution reduction that comes from fossil fuels. You know, there are a lot of members of Congress who are tied to the fossil fuel industry. And what will be interesting now is the oil and gas companies are under tremendous pressure because they were overextended financially, and their workers are out of work. Do, do a lot of the members there look for a new and stronger foundation in manufacturing in the clean energy economy? And those are the kind of bridges we’re going to attempt to build in the future.

CURWOOD: It’s very likely that what we’re living in right now is the greatest economic dislocation of our lifetimes. And the unemployment rolls are just exploding along with this virus. What does your Select Committee on the Climate Crisis have to offer in terms of policies that would create green jobs that would help us in the inevitable recovery that we’re gonna have to stage?
CASTOR: Well, just like the coronavirus, the climate crisis is an unprecedented threat to our public health and safety. But in the end, hopefully it’s an opportunity, to create those long-lasting, clean energy jobs for a more sustainable future for our kids and our grandkids. And I think these jobs run the gamut, yes, of course in clean energy and solar power and wind energy; but also weatherizing our buildings, the way we construct buildings and how we retrofit them, and smart grids, and smart meters. Those will be important jobs. Very important jobs in modernizing the grid across America, connecting the clean energy sources to a modern grid that will serve our businesses and serve our communities. I think the sky’s the limit and, and I know folks are feeling very anxious about this pandemic and, and I hear it from the folks I represent. But the, the coronavirus public health emergency has shown that we can mobilize the planet, we can attack these enormous problems and health emergencies. And I think this ultimately will give us hope and ambition to tackle the climate crisis. And you know, in the end, we don’t really have a choice. We must do this. And we can do this.

CURWOOD: Congresswoman Kathy Castor is Chair of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis and represents the 14th District of the State of Florida. Thank you so much, Congresswoman.

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See also: Science Denial and the Pandemic, Living on Earth, April 3, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic appears well-managed in countries like China and South Korea that moved swiftly, with the science as their guide. Countries that initially downplayed the threat, such as Italy and the United States, have seen spiking death rates as healthcare systems are overwhelmed. Harvard History of Science Professor Naomi Oreskes joins Host Steve Curwood to discuss why some governments fail to follow the science when responding to major crises like pandemics and climate change, and how acceptance of science makes governments better able to prepare and cope with these global disasters. (15:15)

Market Headwinds Buffet Appalachia’s Future as a Center for Petrochemicals

From an Article by James Bruggers, Inside Climate News, March 21, 2020

A Wealth of Financial Problems

The headwinds began blowing in Appalachia last year, when the Braskem and Odebrecht companies ended their plans to construct an ethane cracking plant in West Virginia.

Tens of billions of dollars in petrochemical investment from China, announced in 2017, never materialized. (The West Virginia state government seems fixated on “pie in the sky.” DGN)

And a company seeking to secure $1.9 billion in federal loan guarantees to construct massive underground storage for ethane, promoted as essential to support a petrochemical bonanza along the Ohio River, ran into Congressional opposition. The money would come from a fund that has primarily been used to back wind power, solar and other types of clean energy.

Plastics: From the Gas Well to Your Home

The company, Appalachia Development Group, announced more than a year ago that it had been invited by the Trump administration to submit a second phase of an application for the money. Steven Hedrick, the chief executive officer of the Appalachian Development Group, said this week that he’s still working to complete the application.

And while Pennsylvania lawmakers last month passed a bill that could deliver hundreds of millions of dollars of tax breaks to new plastics, petrochemical or fertilizer plants that use Pennsylvania natural gas as a feedstock, Gov. Tom Wolf has said he would veto the bill.

Suddenly, however, local factors such as tax incentives and financing issues have been dwarfed by the coronavirus pandemic, which, along with Saudi Arabia’s oil price war with Russia, have sent the crude market plummeting to levels not seen in nearly two decades.

That makes Appalachia’s ethane, though still cheap, less competitive as a basic building block of plastics, compared to naphtha — a petroleum product found in other regions whose price falls along with oil.

The Economics Have Never Looked Worse

IHS Markit had removed the proposed $5.7 billion ethane plant in Belmont County, Ohio, from its long-range plastics supply forecast even before the coronavirus pandemic seized the global economy. The project is a collaboration between Thailand’s PTT Global Chemical America and South Korea’s Daelim Industrial.

There has been an oversupply of polyethylene, the product the Ohio plant would make. And IHS sees that overage continuing for at least three more years. Plastics demand will continue to rise, but at a slower rate.

Coronovirus will take its own, additional bite out of global plastics demand. The economics that would support approval of a final investment decision of the (Ohio) project are less compelling today than they have been the entire time it has been under consideration.

Twice since June 2018, Moody’s bond credit rating business, which is used by investors to decide where to put their money, raised doubts about the project. Most recently, in mid-February, Moody’s predicted that PTT Global Chemical this year would “not embark on any new capacity expansion plan until margins improve on a sustained basis.”

In Ohio, the state’s private economic development corporation —JobsOhio — remains optimistic. It has invested nearly $70 million in the project, including for site cleanup and preparation, saying thousands of jobs are in the offing. The companies have obtained their environmental permits. A final investment decision is still expected to be announced by summer, Dan Williamson, a project spokesman said, declining further comment.

But market conditions do not bode particularly well for the venture. Plastics prices today are much lower than what they were from 2010 to 2013, when the Ohio project was being planned, said Tom Sanzillo, director of finance for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. He added that future prices are also projected to be weak.

PTT Global Chemical’s profits were down 60 percent last year, and they’ll have a lot of competition in the United States, he said.

The region’s gas exploration and production companies are also teetering on a financial cliff. They were burdened by debt even as they continued to boost production in 2019. “Taken together, there are a lot of red flags,” said Sanzillo.

Financial Uncertainty Hangs Over Shell—and the Region

All the financial and economic factors at play with regard to the proposed Ohio ethane plant also weigh on the region’s one actual facility, a multi-billion plastics manufacturing plant being built by Shell Polymers in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, 25 miles north of Pittsburgh.

Shell this week temporarily halted construction after some workers and public officials raised concerns about unsafe practices related to the coronavirus.

The project’s future may also be uncertain, said Beckman, the University of Pittsburgh chemical engineering professor. If demand for polyethylene stays strong in China, Shell “may come out OK,” he said.

But that may not happen, and to a big oil company like Shell, “five to six billion bucks in not the end of the world if you have to write that off,” Beckman said.

Shale gas exploration and production companies in the Appalachian Basin were teetering on a financial cliff, even before the coronavirus pandemic’s economic fallout.

A Shell spokesman, Ray Fisher, said Shell does not see “the current price environment” affecting plans at its Beaver County plant. “We take a long-term view of the demand for the products that will come from this site,” he said.

Whatever Shell’s future, the region’s shale deposits are not limitless, said Andrew R. Thomas, the executive in residence at Cleveland State University’s Energy Policy Center.

Natural gas production from the Marcellus and Utica shales has a lifespan of 30 years—possibly 50, if gas wells can be fracked a second time, said Thomas, who has worked in the energy industry as a lawyer and geophysicist,

Losing even 10 years could mean “we lose the opportunity to develop our own petrochemical region,” he said, adding that a recession would frustrate “any investment opportunities.”

In Belmont County, Ohio, Larry Merry, an economic development official, agreed that these are “uncertain times,” a considerable understatement, given the coronavirus’s rapid spread across the nation. But he said that petrochemical firms are “thinking long term—not just about the next couple of months, or even just the next couple of years. So I remain very optimistic.”

Three (3) States’ Natural Gas Boom

Even if multiple ethane cracking plants are never constructed, the region will still be grappling with environmental and health concerns from thousands of fracking sites. And the region could continue to produce natural gas and pipe it elsewhere, said Matthew Mehalik, executive director of Pittsburgh’s Breathe Project, a collaboration of some 40 organizations working to improve air quality and fight climate change.

Long before Shell began construction on its ethane plant outside Pittsburgh, nearby residents and doctors had been alarmed by air pollution from fracking and natural gas processing.

They’ve called for answers on why there has been a surge in Ewing sarcoma, a rare childhood cancer, in a four-county area outside Pittsburgh.

“The health risks and environmental costs never made any sense,” said Mehalik. Now, the economics aren’t making any sense, he said.

There is tremendous uncertainty, including how far state or federal governments are willing to go to prop up the shale gas and plastics manufacturing industries, he said.

“The expansion of natural gas 10 to 15 years ago was made with a different mode of thinking and different market conditions,” Mehalik said. “It’s time for a rethinking, and a rethinking on this opens up prospects for a different economic development vision.”

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See also: Health & Economic Impacts of Cracker Plants 3/24/20

Come and learn from Matt Mehalik, PhD, Executive Director of the Pittsburgh-based Breathe Collaborative, as he talks about the health impacts and economics of cracker plants and the oil and gas industry. This is information that has been gathered through researching the impact that the Shell cracker plant (about 20 miles west of Pittsburgh) would have on the community. Matt brings his expertise to the Ohio Valley to educate people on the truth behind what the PTTG cracker could do to our area if it is built. He also looks at what this plant would do to short and long term economics of the region.

We will connect as a community over what CORR is doing in the Valley to protect the public and what others can do as well. We have plenty of volunteer needs in our effort to educate, inform, and empower communities.

Come and fill out our anonymous community health survey. This helps CORR gather important info. on the health and other concerns folks might have about the cracker plant.

DETAILS: Date: March 24th 2020; Time: 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM

Place: 50 East 39th St. Shadyside, Ohio 43947

Organizer: Concerned Ohio River Residents (CORR)

Royal Dutch Shell yields to government actions

From an Article by Tom Fontaine, Pittsburgh Tribune Review, March 18, 2020

Shell Chemicals said Wednesday it will temporarily halt its multibillion-dollar project to build an ethane cracker plant in Beaver County because of coronavirus concerns. The company then plans to gradually ramp work back up at the sprawling site where about 8,000 people have been working.

“The decision to pause was not made lightly,” Shell Pennsylvania Chemicals Vice President Hilary Mercer said in a statement. “But we feel strongly the temporary suspension of construction activities is in the best long-term interest of our workforce, nearby townships and the commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Mercer added.

The decision came hours after Beaver County government leaders called on Shell to suspend work on the project.

“It’s time to shut down. Do what you have to do, but get to that point where we won’t have anyone on that site,” Beaver County Commissioner Dan Camp said at a news conference late Wednesday morning in front of the county courthouse in Beaver.

Camp, who was joined by fellow Commissioners Tony Amadio and Jack Manning and state Reps. Jim Marshall, Rob Matzie and Josh Kail, said his office had received more than 500 calls in recent days from concerned residents and Shell employees and contractors.

Callers reported crowded conditions on buses that take the project’s thousands of workers to and from the work site, limited hand sanitizer and other problems.

“With 8,000 workers, if something happens there, our health care facilities will not be able to undertake what they will have to do,” Camp said, noting that the Heritage Valley Beaver hospital is equipped with only 40 ventilators.

“There’s potential for a very catastrophic outbreak,” Manning added.

The government leaders said they had been in communication with Shell and Gov. Tom Wolf’s office about their concerns. “I believe Shell understands the problem and our concerns. I have confidence they will do the right thing,” Camp said.

The company did not say how long it would suspend work or how long it might take to ramp work back up to full capacity. “As of now, there is no definitive timeline to return to construction activities,” spokesman Curtis Smith said. “It’s too early to know that. For now, our focus is on the 8,000 workers who have dedicated their time and talent to this project.”

The company said it would spend the coming days installing what it called “additional mitigation measures” at the site. Smith said those measures haven’t been finalized, but could include using additional buses to transport workers to and from the site and installing more sanitizing stations and work tents on the site.

No workers at the site have shown symptoms of covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, according to Smith.

Work on the project is expected to be completed sometime in the early 2020s, Smith said. When the plant begins operating, it will process ethane from the Marcellus and Utica shale reservoirs into ethylene and polyethylene, the building blocks of plastic. Officials have said it will employ about 600 full-time workers, and hundreds of others jobs could be created by spinoff companies related to the plastics industry.

“Our goal is to build a positive, decades long legacy in the region,” Mercer said in her statement. “That means earning our right to live and work here every day. It also means caring for people. While (suspending work is) understandably disappointing to many, we believe this decision honors that approach.”

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Shell ‘s construction crew at risk of COVID-19 sickness

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania (WPVI) — Gov. Tom Wolf is tightening his directives to businesses to shut down, issuing a dire warning and saying Thursday that all “non-life-sustaining” businesses in Pennsylvania must close their physical locations by 8 p.m. to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Enforcement actions against businesses that do not close their physical locations will begin Saturday, March 21st, Wolf said in a statement.

You can also find the list at this link.

Shell plant promotes fracking, air pollution, plastic pollution & virus risks

From an Article by Andy Sheehan, KDKA Local CBS News 2, March 16, 2020

BEAVER COUNTY (KDKA) — Over the last few days, KDKA has received questions about the Shell Cracker plant that is under construction in the Ohio River valley in Beaver County, PA.

The coronavirus has not slowed construction at the multibillion-dollar cracker plant as thousands of workers continue to speed the project towards completion. But those same workers say the site is riddled with unsanitary conditions and standard social distancing protocols are being ignored.

In more than a dozen emails to KDKA, workers raised concerns about being transported to the site on crowded buses and called daily to mandatory mass meetings.

Further, the workers say the portajohns are unsanitary and frequently run out of hand sanitizer, making the entire site what one person calls a huge Petri dish for the virus.

But it now appears that Shell is listening. Responding to KDKA’s inquiries, the oil giant said on Monday that changes are in the works to ensure the health and safety of those who work here.

“We are currently obtaining more busses and staggering shifts and lunch times to improve social distancing amongst workers. We are also curtailing large meetings on site,” the company said it a statement.

The statement goes on to talk of deeper, more frequent cleaning measures and increased placement of hand sanitizer on site. Shell says it is responding to a fluid situation but emphasized that no one has tested positive for the virus. Shell also says it is committed to the health and safety of its workers.

Shell made no mention of shutting the site down, so construction will continue.

Shell full statement can be found below:

“Our goal is to always keep our workers safe from health and safety risks, including that of COVID-19.

We are reviewing new guidance from OSHA and will incorporate relevant new elements from that guidance into our response, as appropriate.”

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See also: Workers, residents: ‘Shell should halt cracker plant construction’ — Chrissy Suttles, Ellwood City Ledger, March 17, 2020

Some Shell Chemicals workers and residents are demanding the company temporarily cease cracker plant construction as Beaver County reels from its first confirmed COVID-19 case.