Shell Commits to Building a Billion Dollar Chemical Plant in the Marcellus Region of U.S.

Royal Dutch Shell, one of the largest energy companies in the world, announced on Monday that it will build a “world-scale” chemical plant in the Marcellus region of the United States. The chemical plant is called a “cracker” and typically costs more than a billion dollars to construct. Its construction would provide thousands of both short-term construction and long-term operations jobs. Both West Virginia and Pennsylvania have been actively courting chemical companies to build one or more cracker plants in their states (see this MDN story).

The cracker plant would take advantage of one of the byproducts of Marcellus Shale drilling—ethane—which is converted to the hydrocarbon ethylene. Ethylene is a “feedstock” (or raw material) used to make plastics, including polyethylene, the most manufactured and widely-used plastic in the world (see MDN’s brief petrochemical primer here).

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