Shell Cracker chemical plant will release a large excess of dangerous volatile organic compounds (VOCs)

Donald Trump is coming to tour the Beaver, PA petrochemical cracker plant on Tuesday, August 13th as a campaign move. There will be a non-violent protest to show that there are many people who oppose this plant and the industry. We will be car pooling from John Marshall High School in Glen Dale, WV. We will have a time on MONDAY. It will most likely be sometime in the late morning/afternoon. Please RSVP as soon as possible if you would like to join. Just reply to this email!

Thank you for your concerns and activities,

Bev Reed, Sierra Club Intern
Beyond Dirty Fuels Campaign
reed.b1@yahoo.com
www.nocrackerplantOV.com

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Shell cracker plant will bring pollutants

Letter to Editor, Beaver County Times, August 3, 2019

A sign outside the Vanport Township Hot Dog Shoppe says, “The secret of freedom is courage.” I would add “honesty” so that it would read, “The secret of freedom is honesty and courage.”

Many hope that the ethane cracker plant being built in Potter Township will bring prosperity to Beaver County, and it takes courage to disagree. Why question Shell Chemicals’ promise that 600 permanent jobs will be created, and that the spinoff from those jobs as well as the construction jobs will lift Beaver County into prosperity?

The first reason to question Shell’s claims is people’s health. Shell itself tells us that its emissions will include annually 1,012 tons of carbon monoxide, 159 tons of fine particulates, 522 tons of volatile organic compounds and 2.25 million tons of carbon dioxide.

People are going to get sick, especially children, smokers, and elderly people. More people will have asthma and other lung diseases. There will be more heart attacks and cancers of all kinds.

Second, this region can present itself as a beautiful place to be, live and work. But with such pollutants relentlessly billowing from the south bank of the Ohio River, that claim will be empty.

Finally, the promised jobs are so few. There are better ways to encourage job production than giving a huge international polluter $1.65 billion in tax breaks.

Go look at the sign outside the Hot Dog Shoppe. Think about courage and honesty, and about freedom.

Nora Johnson, Pittsburgh

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Community outreach in WV and PA some 35 years after Bhopal, Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) …… (long and detailed article)

SHELL CHEMICAL is 7 years into a community liaison program for an ethylene cracker it began building a year and a half ago on the Ohio River near Pittsburgh. New to the region, with the first petrochemical plant accessing ethane from the Marcellus Shale natural gas reserve, Shell will be relying on community outreach know-how that the industry has garnered over decades.

Some 200 mi (322 km) south, companies in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia, host to scores of chemical operations since World War I, have confronted the challenge of opening up to communities and organizing outreach since the 1980s.

Shocked into taking action by the deadly 1984 accident at a chemical plant in Bhopal, India—a sister facility to one in West Virginia—companies in the region became pioneers in a global industry-improvement program called Responsible Care. In the 35th anniversary year of the Bhopal explosion, C&EN traveled to Pennsylvania and West Virginia to assess the current state of community relations in the chemical industry.

The disaster’s legacy remains a work in progress at the interface of the chemical industry and the public, by Rick Mullin.

AUGUST 12, 2019 | APPEARED IN C&EN, VOLUME 97, ISSUE 32

See the full article here.