Risks are great for leaks, fires, explosions, and adverse health effects

From an Article by Kathiann M. Kowalski, The Conversation, May 31, 2019

A proposed petrochemical feedstock hub could expand markets for natural gas liquids in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky. Several environmental groups are considering legal options if the Trump administration approves $1.9 billion taxpayer-backed loan guarantee.

A development corporation is seeking a $1.9 billion federal loan guarantee to help build an Appalachian storage hub for natural gas liquids. The financing guarantee would come from a U.S. Department of Energy program meant to support projects that “avoid, reduce, or sequester” air pollutants or greenhouse gas emissions and feature “new or significantly improved technologies.”

The Title XVII program has never been used to finance a fossil fuel storage project, but environmental groups fear the Trump administration will bend criteria to approve the project.

“It just does not fit the legal criteria” of the federal law, said Alison Grass, research director at Washington, D.C.-based Food & Water Watch, one of several environmental groups that is considering legal options.

The proposal from Appalachia Development Group, LLC, calls for an underground storage facility to hold natural gas liquids from “wet gas,” such as ethane, which are used to make plastics and other products.

The storage facility’s site in Ohio, West Virginia or Pennsylvania hasn’t been finalized. The hub would have a web of pipelines and other infrastructure to collect and distribute feedstocks from all three states, plus possibly Kentucky.

Not on the list

Steve Hedrick, CEO of Appalachia Development Group, said the project would “significantly” reduce emissions by minimizing the distances the liquids are transported before they are turned into plastic products.

“With over half of the North American plastics converter market within 500 miles of Appalachia, the need for redundant transport is minimized while maximizing the value creation from the American resource,” Hedrick said via email. “In other words, we can significantly avoid or reduce anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases merely through conversion of these raw materials closer to their production locations.”

Hedrick did not offer a source or calculations of the amount of presumed emissions cuts resulting from transporting materials over fewer miles.

The Title XVII statute lists ten categories of projects that can qualify for loan guarantees under the federal program. They include renewable energy systems, hydrogen fuel cell technologies, electric vehicle plants, and energy efficiency projects. Advanced nuclear facilities can also qualify, as well as some refineries for processing crude oil into gasoline. The bill even allows loan guarantees for certain pollution control equipment and advanced fossil fuel technology, such as coal gasification that would achieve specific emission reductions.

Missing from the itemized list are facilities to store and distribute hydrocarbon feedstocks from fossil fuels.

That’s not for lack of trying. Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., introduced a bill in 2017 to add a facility like the Appalachian storage hub to the list. The bill did not pass.

However, the Department of Energy invited Appalachia Development Group to submit the second phase of the loan application last year while the bill was pending. It had already approved the first part of the company’s application. The department did not respond to an email and follow-up phone call seeking comments for this article.

The DOE has not yet made a final decision on the Part II application. Approval can take anywhere from roughly six months to two years, Hedrick said. He noted that the application itself is considered confidential business information.

Bipartisan support: Ohio and WV Senators Apparently Approve

Industry interests have wanted the underground storage facility and associated pipelines for several years now. One apparent aim is to increase the market and revenue for the region’s natural gas and its co-products.

Prices for natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica plays have been relatively low in recent years. A lack of infrastructure has made it hard to get it out of the region into markets where it can command higher prices. A similar lack of infrastructure has also suppressed profits from ethane, propane, butane and other liquid gas products.

Supporters also hope the storage hub would attract more chemical companies to the region to use ethane and various natural gas liquids as feedstocks for plastics and other chemicals, which could then be used by other manufacturers.

A natural gas liquids storage hub in Appalachia “would be an economic driver for the region, would expand energy infrastructure, and would increase our domestic production of the petrochemical resources we rely on,” Manchin said last month when he introduced another bill relating to the hub. It calls for a federal study on the project’s potential benefits “to national and economic security.”

“The Trump Administration would also support an Appalachia hub to strengthen our energy and manufacturing security by increasing our geographic production diversity,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said in December. His comment came with the release of a Department of Energy report, saying the hub would satisfy market needs and yield billions of dollars in economic and other benefits.

Along the same lines, President Donald Trump’s April 10 executive order on energy infrastructure calls for the DOE to prepare a report on the proposed hub, “describing opportunities, through the Federal Government or otherwise, to promote economic growth of the Appalachian region, including growth of petrochemical and other industries.”

‘Short-sighted’ Economic Development Plan

That’s a “short-sighted economic development plan,” countered Climate & Energy Program Director Mitch Jones at Food & Water Watch’s Baltimore office. “They’re rushing here to replace the coal industry with another fossil fuel industry.”

Scientists say there’s a growing urgency to curb fossil fuels to avoid some of the worst impacts of climate change. Recent reports also call for cutting down on single-use plastics, which are linked to ocean and freshwater pollution, Jones said. Appalachia would be better off focusing on the renewable energy industry, he said.

Critics also say the project could lead to a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions by boosting natural gas production in the region. “If anything, it’s going to result in a dramatic uptick in drilling and likely flaring and other emissions upstream if this thing comes online,” said Ted Auch, Great Lakes program coordinator for FracTracker Alliance.

Critics also question the propriety of having U.S. taxpayers guarantee a loan for a project that will have significant funding from Chinese investors. “I have no idea why our government would issue loan guarantees to facilitate foreign investments for product that is intended to prop up the faltering fracking industry, as well as to be shipped overseas,” said Leatra Harper, managing director for the FreshWater Accountability Project.

What’s next?

So far, the House Appropriations Committee has not added a requested budget bill provision to stop the Department of Energy from spending money to process the loan guarantee application or to grant it.

Food & Water Watch, FreshWater Accountability Project, FracTracker and dozens of other organizations requested that provision on May 7. The request could be renewed once the budget bill gets to the House floor.

Advocates are also considering other legal options if a provision isn’t in the budget bill or if the department nonetheless goes ahead and grants the loan guarantee, Jones said.

It’s conceivable that the project could still move ahead even if the loan guarantee were not granted. But it’s unclear whether that would happen.

“One would think that if the investment were as smart an investment as they’re arguing that it is, they would be able to get the loan without a federal loan guarantee, certainly,” Jones said. “What we’re seeing is the belief that this federal loan guarantee is the key that they need to secure the outside funding that they need to move forward.”

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See Also: Plastics Industry on Track to Burn Through 14% of World’s Remaining Carbon Budget: New Report, Sharon Kelly, DeSmogBlog, May 15, 2019

The plastics industry plays a major — and growing — role in climate change, according to a report published today by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).

By 2050, making and disposing of plastics could be responsible for a cumulative 56 gigatons of carbon, the report found, up to 14 percent of the world’s remaining carbon budget.

In 2019, the plastics industry is on track to release as much greenhouse gas pollution as 189 new coal-fired power plants running year-round, the report found — and the industry plans to expand so rapidly that by 2030, it will create 1.34 gigatons of climate-changing emissions a year, equal to 295 coal plants.

Virtually no regulations to protect the public !!!

From an Article by Sharon Kelly, DeSmog Blog, April 12, 2019

This week, at an industry conference focused on wooing petrochemical producers to West Virginia, officials from the state and federal government made clear their support for continuing fracked shale gas extraction and petrochemical industry development near the natural gas-rich Marcellus Shale.

Why should petrochemical companies build in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio? For one thing, don’t expect regulation of shale gas drilling, Michael Graney, executive director of the West Virginia Development Office, predicted in his presentation.

“Contrasted to other U.S. regions, Tri-State region is industry-supportive and industry-friendly,” read a slide that Graney, who was appointed by West Virginia Governor Jim Justice in September 2018, presented to the conference. “Virtually no risk of drilling restrictions.”

Graney also elicited “hallelujahs” from the crowd after describing West Virginia’s low worker turnover rates. “We have earned an A from the Cato Institute in fiscal policies,” he told representatives from fossil fuel and petrochemical companies, referring to a libertarian think tank that Sourcewatch describes as “founded by Charles G. Koch and funded by the Koch brothers.”

‘Everything within the government’s power’

Shell is already building a massive plastic manufacturing plant reliant on fracked-gas feedstocks known as an “ethane cracker,” in Pennsylvania. Credit: Sharon Kelly, DeSmog

At the ninth annual West Virginia Manufacturers Association’s Marcellus and Manufacturing Development Conference, officials from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) offered the petrochemical industry the services of the federal government.

“And what we’re going to do is everything within the government’s power to shine a bright light on this and help get this over the finish line,” Steven Winberg, the Department of Energy’s Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy, told the conference. “With regard to DOE, there’s a couple of things that we can do. One is, private sector investors can take advantage of the DOE’s loan guarantee program.”

“We can walk you through that process, the loan guarantee process that the DOE has,” he continued.

Second, the Department of Energy hired a full-time staffer to push for petrochemical projects, according to Winberg, a former vice president for the coal and natural gas producer CONSOL Energy. “Secretary Perry gave me instructions to get somebody on board full time to work on behalf of the federal government to make this happen. And that somebody is Ken Humphreys.”

“I want to put a name with a face — so this is your guy here,” Winberg said, asking Humphreys to stand. “It is his job to do whatever the federal government can to help make this a reality.”

Humphreys served from 2010 to 2016 as the CEO of the FutureGen Industrial Alliance, which represented a group of nine coal and power companies, including CONSOL Energy, which were seeking Department of Energy funding for a carbon capture project, according to SourceWatch.

That project left behind a troubled history before its ultimate cancellation. In 2005, the DOE predicted FutureGen would be a “prototype of the fossil-fueled power plant of the future.” In 2008, the DOE announced the project would be re-structured amid cost over-runs.

In 2009, a House of Representatives subcommittee report examined the project’s viability. “DOE was extremely reluctant to produce documents to the Committee so that it could determine exactly how decisions were made concerning FutureGen,” that report found. “In retrospect, FutureGen appears to have been nothing more than a public relations ploy for Bush Administration officials to make it appear to the public and the world that the United States was doing something to address global warming despite its refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.”

However, the project was modified and revived, with $1 billion in federal stimulus funding promised — then canceled entirely in 2015, after remaining behind schedule and over-budget.

National Energy Technology Laboratory Chief — With a Petrochemical Past

Winberg was not the only DOE official offering the services of the federal government to the industry at this conference. Brian Anderson was appointed in November to run the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), part of the Energy Department.

Anderson, as DeSmog previously reported, had been “listed as one of the principals” by Appalachia Development Group, which has sought to develop an underground storage site for natural gas liquids, the raw materials from gas wells that can be used by petrochemical manufacturers.

“Since he became the director at NETL, which falls under the Department of Energy umbrella, Anderson said he’s severed all connections with Appalachia Development Group,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on November 27, 2018.

In January, Anderson had been slated to speak at the West Virginia Energy Infrastructure Summit. DeSmog reporter Steve Horn raised questions about potential conflicts of interest, given Anderson’s role at Appalachia Development Group.

“The Department follows all federal laws and ethics requirements regarding onboarding new employees,” a DOE spokesperson told DeSmog. “The employee in question has been counseled regarding recusal from matters relating to past employers.” Anderson never spoke at that conference.

At this week’s conference, Anderson’s presentation focused on the support that his new federal office could provide for the fossil fuel industry — and for the region’s petrochemical industry in particular.

“Effectively the question is, what is the Marcellus going to do for us in manufacturing in this region?” Anderson told the audience of industry representatives. “And so, within that big question is what can NETL do within this region, as a partner in manufacturing?”

“We manage a $6.6 billion research portfolio across the U.S. and globe,” he added, describing various NETL “research projects to ensure that fossil energy can stay competitive as well as meet some of those emissions goals of our country and the globe.”

Anderson emphasized that even though petrochemical projects produce goods, not energy, supporting the industry through research fell within NETL’s Congressional mandate. “And so, the Department of Energy, one of our missions — within our mission — is to use our natural resources, our energy natural resources responsibly,” Anderson told the conference. “And it’s a responsible use of the natural gas liquids resource not to burn it, but to use it for building and manufacturing.”

A slide from Anderson’s presentation for NETL, titled “Energizing Regional Innovation Through Partnerships,” displayed logos from the Appalachia Storage and Trading Hub, a project planned by Appalachia Development Group, and from MATRIC, an owner of the Appalachian Development Group.

Taking the Federal Government’s Help

Appalachia Development Group — Anderson’s former firm — has been making strides toward obtaining loan guarantees from the DOE, Joe Bozada, a company executive, told the conference, including a loan guarantee roughly twice the size of the $1 billion DOE support offered to the FutureGen project.

“So, that’s a $1.9 billion loan guarantee,” Bozada told the conference. “We successfully completed that part one, and we’ve been invited to participate in part two,” of the DOE’s process.

“In the past 18 months, we’ve actually completed a lot of work,” he said. “One was getting the application to the loan permit office, that was very, very tough to do. And many folks in the room were actually part of that, so thank you for that.”

While company representatives spoke of the importance of federal assistance, the state’s political representatives expressed their support — and also decried the notion that the government should play favorites.

“We can’t allow the federal government to pick winners and losers when it comes to our energy policy,” Senator Joe Manchin said in a video recorded for the conference, “and we certainly can’t have them demonizing the resources that have powered this nation for decades. Coal and natural gas is a big part of that.”​

Meanwhile, outside the conference, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition Project Coordinator Dustin White spoke to a rally organized in opposition to the petrochemical industry’s plans for the region, The Dominion Post reported. “They scream jobs and like a carrot on a stick, and politicians chase them,” White said.

“The [Appalachian Storage Hub] scheme is an unimaginative regression to 1950s era economic development,” White said in a statement. “Why can’t we have real innovation?”

“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,” said Bridgeport, Ohio, resident, Bev Reed, who also attended the rally and lives near the site of a proposed plastic factory. “The tide needs to shift to alternatives to plastic, rather than creating more.”

Main image: A slide from a presentation by West Virginia official Michael Graney, who listed “virtually no risk of drilling restrictions” as a reason to bring fracked-gas reliant petrochemical development to the region. Credit: Sharon Kelly, DeSmog

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

Plastics may be the new coal in Appalachia. But at what cost to health and climate?

From an Article by James Bruggers, InsideClimate News, March 6, 2019

MONACA, Pa. — Along the banks of the Ohio River here, thousands of workers are assembling the region’s first ethane cracker plant. It’s a conspicuous symbol of a petrochemical and plastics future looming across the Appalachian region.

More than 70 construction cranes tower over hundreds of acres where zinc was smelted for nearly a century. In a year or two, Shell Polymers, part of the global energy company Royal Dutch Shell, plans to turn what’s called “wet gas” into plastic pellets that can be used to make a myriad of products, from bottles to car parts.

Two Asian companies could also announce any day that they plan to invest as much as $6 billion in a similar plant in Ohio. There’s a third plastics plant proposed for West Virginia.

With little notice nationally, a new petrochemical and plastics manufacturing hub may be taking shape along 300 miles of the upper reaches of the Ohio River, from outside Pittsburgh southwest to Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky. It would be fueled by a natural gas boom brought on by more than a decade of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a drilling process that has already dramatically altered the nation’s energy landscape—and helped cripple coal.

But there’s a climate price to be paid. Planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from the Shell plant alone would more or less wipe out all the reductions in carbon dioxide that Pittsburgh, just 25 miles away, is planning to achieve by 2030. Drilling for natural gas leaks methane, a potent climate pollutant; and oil consumption for petrochemicals and plastics may account for half the global growth in petroleum demand between now and 2050.

A look at ethane cracker plants along the Ohio River

Despite the climate and environmental risks, state and business leaders and the Trump administration are promoting plastics and petrochemical development as the next big thing, more than three decades after the region’s steel industry collapsed and as Appalachian coal mining slumps.

“We have been digging our way out of a very deep hole for decades,” said Jack Manning, president and executive director of the Beaver County Chamber of Commerce.

“When Shell came along with a $6 to $7 billion investment … we were in the right spot at the right time,” he said.

Everyone wants jobs and economic growth, said Cat Lodge, who works with communities in the Ohio River Valley affected by the shale gas industry for the Environmental Integrity Project, a national environmental group. But not everyone wants them to be based on another form of polluting, fossil fuels, she said.

“While the rest of the world is dealing with global warming, Pennsylvania and Ohio and West Virginia are embracing developing plastics, and that just appalls me,” Lodge says. “It’s just not something I see as the future and unfortunately that seems to be the push to make that the future. And that’s upsetting.”

Lodge and her husband moved from Pittsburgh to the countryside 18 years ago in search of fresh air and open land. They have a small farm in a corner of rural western Pennsylvania, where winding roads trace the contours of Appalachian hills and a stark transition fueled by a shale gas boom is underway.

“We still love it, but little by little, and quickly over the last several years, we have become totally surrounded by the oil and gas industry,” she said.

Rising demand, but also pushback on plastics

The natural gas that’s pulled from deep underground in the Utica and Marcellus shale formations has done more than outcompete coal for electricity generation.
Drilling companies have also extracted a lot of natural gas liquids, particularly ethane, also called wet gas. It’s used to produce ethylene, which then gets turned into plastics, providing an additional revenue stream for the oil and gas industry. It’s the industry’s latest play, and it comes at a time when industry analysts and the federal government say the demand for plastics is skyrocketing.

“These materials are hooked into just about every part of the economy, from housing to electronics to packaging,” said Dave Witte, a senior vice president at IHS Markit, a global data and information service. “Today, the world needs six of these plants to be built every year to keep up with demand growth.”

IHS Markit calls the Appalachian or upper Ohio River region “the Shale Crescent.” Last year, it reported that the region’s gas supplies could support as many as five large cracker plants, like the one Shell is building. The plants “crack” ethane molecules to make ethylene and polyethylene resin pellets and would be in close proximity to a number of manufacturers that use those products to make everything from paints to plastic bags.

IHS does see some headwinds, including an international backlash against plastics. It published a report last summer that found that worldwide pressure to reduce plastic use and increase recycling was one of the biggest potential disruptors for the plastics industry and was “putting future plastics resin demand and billions of dollars of industry investments at risk.”

The oil and gas industry might find themselves with stranded assets, needing to abandon Ohio River valley communities, said Lisa Graves-Marcucci, a Pennsylvania-based organizer for the Environmental Integrity Project.

“Do they really care,” she asked, “if they can make money for the first 10 years or 20 years of their operation, but then plastic goes away in the world? What happens to the communities that are left behind?”

She said she is also worried about such a major investment in oil and gas as the world grapples with the effects of climate change.

Visions of an Appalachian plastics hub

The idea for a plastics hub in Appalachia got a lift in December with a report to Congress from the U.S. Department of Energy. It described a proposal for the development of regional underground storage of ethane along or underneath the upper Ohio River.

Storage is needed to help provide a steady and reliable stream of ethane to ethane cracking plants, and it would be important for the development of a regional petrochemical complex in the upper Ohio River valley, the report concluded.

A West Virginia business, Appalachia Development Group LLC, has proposed developing storage for ethane, possibly in mined salt or limestone caverns deep underground. It’s in the second phase of an application process for $1.9 billion in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy for the project, according to the department.

“We have sites of interest in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia,” said Jamie Altman, a representative of Appalachia Development Group. “We are aggressively pursuing private capital.”

Its report projects ethane production in the Appalachian basin would continue rapid growth through 2025 to a total of 640,000 barrels per day, more than 20 times greater than five years ago. By 2050, the agency said ethane production in the region is projected to reach 950,000 barrels per day.

China Energy signed an agreement with West Virginia in 2017 to potentially invest $84 billion in shale gas development and chemical manufacturing projects in the state. Late in January, West Virginia’s development director, Mike Graney, told state senators that China Energy was looking at three undisclosed “energy and petrochemical” projects. An announcement could be made later this year, he said, though President Donald Trump’s trade war with China was causing delays.

Other experts see a natural gas industry that’s subject to booms and busts and question whether the region is headed down another unsustainable path, like coal.

“We are less optimistic than the industry that this will really boom out,” said Cathy Kunkel, an energy analyst with Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an environmental think tank that just published a report detailing how the natural gas industry in West Virginia hasn’t lived up to earlier expectations for jobs and tax revenue.

There is a huge amount of international competition for plastic production, she said. “All of the major oil exporting countries in the Middle East are talking about making massive investments in petrochemicals over the next five years or so,” she said. “That contains the risk that you will be exporting into a market that would be oversaturated with products.”

IHS Markit, a global data and information service, published a report last summer that said worldwide pressure to reduce plastic use and increase recycling was one of the biggest potential disruptors for the plastics industry and was “putting future plastics resin demand and billions of dollars of industry investments at risk.” Credit: Rosemary Calvert via Getty Images

The Energy Department report also cited “security and supply diversity” as a benefit of developing a new plastics and petrochemicals hub in Appalachia. The bulk of U.S. plastics and petrochemical plants are currently along the Gulf Coast, where they face supply disruptions caused by hurricanes, it said.

Vivian Stockman, the interim director of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition based in West Virginia, called that a “hugely ironic” justification for an Appalachian plastics hub, since science is showing that global warming can intensify hurricanes.

Economic benefits, with health concerns

The Shell plant was lured to Beaver County by Pennsylvania officials with some $1.65 billion in tax incentives. It’s scheduled to open “early next decade,” company spokesman Ray Fisher said. This year, as many as 6,000 construction workers will be working on it, and Shell says it plans 600 permanent jobs to run the plant.

It’s in Potter Township, a community with fewer than 700 residents. Rebecca Matsco, who chairs the township commission that gave Shell the local zoning permits, said she sees the plastics plant as an industrial upgrade from a dirty zinc smelter that had stood on the property for about a century, and that Shell cleaned up.

“It had become a real environmental burden, and we do feel like Shell has been a real partner in lifting that burden,” Matsco said.

Others, however, see the cracker plant as its own environmental burden — a new source of emissions that cause lung-damaging smog and heat the planet.

People in Pittsburgh were sad to see so much of the steel industry go, but they don’t miss the dirty skies, said Graves-Marcucci, an Allegheny County resident. The economic resurgence that followed was centered on health care, academic institutions and cleaner industries, she said.

Pittsburgh has been brushing off its sooty steel city past and is now pledging to slash its carbon emissions. But the Shell cracker plant alone, just 25 miles away, would emit 2.25 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, effectively wiping out nearly all the gains in carbon reduction that Pittsburgh plans to achieve by 2030, said Grant Ervin, Pittsburgh’s chief resilience officer.

The Shell plant will also emit as much smog-forming pollution as 36,000 cars driving 12,000 miles year; that would equate to about a 25 percent increase in the number of cars in Beaver County, said James Fabisiak, an associate professor and director of the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities at the University of Pittsburgh.

The environmental and health threats will only increase with a plastics hub buildout, and no regulators are looking at those potential cumulative impacts, Graves-Marcucci said.

Two more communities could get cracker plants

About 70 miles southeast of the Shell plant, another community waits for news about what could be the region’s second major ethane cracker plant, in Belmont County, Ohio.

PTT Global Chemical, based in Thailand, and its Korean partner, Daelim Industrial Co., Ltd., could announce any day whether they intend to proceed with an ethane cracker plant after getting state permits in late December. That plant would be along a section of the Ohio River in Belmont County where hulking old manufacturing plants and shuttered businesses paint the very picture of the nation’s Rust Belt.

“Do you know what the biggest export is from Belmont County? Our youth,” said Larry Merry, an economic development officer with the Belmont County Port Authority, overlooking the Ohio River bottomlands where the cracker plant would be constructed on the cleared-away site of a former coal-fired power plant.

Merry, who has been working to secure the plastics plant, called the oil and gas industry “a great employer for us that’s provided a lot of investment that’s helped.”

But it’s not fully made up for losses in steel and coal, and this cracker plant “is about jobs and opportunities so people can make the most of their lives,” he said.

He brushed aside any concerns about climate change or too much plastics. “How are we going to live and have products? Until you come up with a solution, don’t expect the world to shut down,” he said.

A spokesman for PTT American said he could not say when an investment decision will be made.

A third potential cracker plant is planned for Wood County, West Virginia, but it has been delayed because of unspecified “challenges” with its parent company, the Department of Energy report said.

“It just blows my mind that there could be three or four cracker plants, or even one,” said Steve White, a western Pennsylvania builder. “That’s some serious investment. It just shows you where everything is headed and how much development is coming.”

White is also a pilot, and he said he has observed from the cabin of a Cessna 3,000 feet aloft the spread of oil wells, pipelines and processing plants across shale drilling zones in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, slicing up farms and encroaching on homes, schools and businesses.

“We are just in the way,” he said.

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