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.

Evergas Tankers Transport Ethane from Marcus Hook to Europe

From an Article by Mike Corkhill, LNG World Shipping, July 26, 2018

The first of a pair of very large ethane carriers (VLECs) under construction at the Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Co (DSIC) shipyard for Evergas has been floated out from its building dock. The occasion was accompanied by cutting first steel for the second of the pair.

The two 85,000 m3 ethane carriers will be chartered to INEOS Trading & Shipping to carry ethane from the US Gulf to China. SP Chemicals has contracted to buy the cargoes that the first of the two VLECs will transport, for use as feedstock in a new 650,000 tonnes per annum ethylene cracker it is building at Taixing in China’s Jiangsu province.

The two newbuildings represent an extension of the ethane delivery capabilities of the shipping and trading arm of the giant INEOS petrochemical group. INEOS Trading & Shipping already charters eight 27,500 m3 Evergas-operated, Dragon-class ethane carriers for the transatlantic delivery of competitively priced US ethane to group ethylene crackers at Grangemouth in Scotland and Rafnes in Norway.

The first of the DSIC newbuildings is due for completion in Q1 2019. The pair, like the Dragon-class ethane carriers, are being built to the semi-pressurised/fully refrigerated (semi-ref) gas carrier design.

The vessels represent the first application of the semi-ref design to very large gas carriers and will be fitted with the largest IMO Type C pressure vessel cargo tanks ever constructed. IMO Type C gas tank containment systems do not require a secondary barrier.

Three of the four cargo tanks on each VLEC are being built to the Star Tri-lobe configuration to help optimise the cargo-carrying space available when the Type C containment system is chosen. The largest of the tri-lobe units, which consist of three cylinders combined into one, on the DSIC VLECs has a capacity of 23,000 m3 and weighs 1,800 tonnes.

For a given hull envelope, the tri-lobe solution offers a 20% increase in cargo space compared to using bi-lobe tanks. The Star Tri-lobe design was developed by JHW Engineering and Contracting in co-operation with the Hartmann Group. JHW, like Evergas, is part of the Jaccar Group.

Each of the DSIC VLECs will be powered by one of MAN’s M-type electronically controlled gas-injection (ME-GI) main engines. MAN designates the ethane-burning version of the ME-GI engine as its ME-GIE unit. Each vessel will be provided with a pair of deck-mounted cylindrical tanks to hold ethane fuel.

MAN Energy Solutions has supplied the 6G60 ME-GIE engine for each VLEC complete with its newly developed pump vaporiser unit (PVU), a device that ensures the supply of high-pressure gas to the ME-GIE engine in the correct manner. Providing full pump redundancy, the PVU costs less and occupies less space than previous fuel-gas supply systems for MAN’s high-pressure engines.