Aither Chemical Corporation was formed last year in West Virginia.  The objective is to use catalytic cracking technology originally developed at Union Carbide in South Charleston, WV, for the “cracking” of ethane into ethylene.  Such a cracker could be located at Institute, WV, for example.  It could use ethane from the Marcellus “wet gas” of our region in a chemical plant employing perhaps 200 people at a cost of about $300 million. 

According to the Charleston Gazette story by Eric Eyre, Aither has 10 employees and was formed by Mid-Atlantic Technology, Research & Innovation Center, or MATRIC, a South Charleston organization with offices and laboratories at the former Dow Tech Park in South Charleston. In March, Aither prepared a news release about the pending cracker announcement. The company distributed the release to state officials. Aither also had planned to hold a news conference, but the event never happened. The news conference did not materialize because not all the plans were complete. Work is underway to tie down all the aspects as soon as possible.

Bayer CropScience owns the site where the cracker plant would be built. Aither also is negotiating with Denver-based MarkWest Energy Partners, which would supply ethane to the facility. Aither spokesman Jason Keeling said the company was actively searching for sites to build a cracker facility, but he declined to name potential partners.

Aither is expected to build the Institute cracker plant in stages, starting with a smaller production facility. Full-scale production is expected to begin in 2014. The plant would generate about $500 million in annual sales. This catalytic cracking process is less expensive and cleaner than traditional steam cracking facilities, according to the company.

According to Pam Kasey, writing in the State Journal, the midstream companies that are separation out ethane in this region are MarkWest, operating in the Marcellus region as MarkWest Liberty Midstream and Resources and in the Utica as MarkWest Utica EMG; Dominion Transmission Inc., of Richmond, Va.; Chesapeake Energy’s subsidiary Chesapeake Midstream Development and its partners; and Dallas, Texas, based Caiman Energy. These companies remove the liquids from the raw natural gas through cryogenation (sub-zero cooling), then separate them through fractionation (distillation) into methane, ethane, propane, butane, etc.