Expert Says PTT Ethane Cracker in Belmont, OH Will Get Built
We’ve written many articles about the potential PTT cracker plant since April 2015 when PTT, a huge petrochemical company based in Thailand, first announced they would consider building an ethane cracker plant in Ohio (see It’s Official: Belmont County Chosen as POSSIBLE Cracker Plant Site). PTT has teased a “final investment decision” (FID) to move forward and begin construction so many times over the years since then, we’ve lost count and we’ve become a bit jaded about the prospects for the project. However, someone we highly admire and respect, someone who really would know whether or not it will get built, now says he is “highly confident one way or another…it’s going to happen.”
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Over the years we’ve covered a number of stories about companies buying future royalty payments from landowners (and rights owners) for an upfront, one lump sum payment now. Normally the deals don’t disclose how much money changed hands for those upfront payments. We have some recent transactions from a newcomer to the Marcellus/Utica, a company willing to announce how much they paid to buy those rights, which caught our attention. We have financial details for a deal in the Marcellus, and details for a deal in the Utica to share with you. We have hard numbers for how much they paid to buy those royalty rights.
We spotted an interesting article on the Forbes website about microproppants–really really tiny particles of sand or ceramic beads–and how the smaller the size of the proppant, the more likely it is to keep cracks in shale rock open and flowing natural gas and oil. In the Utica Shale, for example, a special kind of microproppant called DEEPROP will yield an additional revenue of $315,000 – $585,000 per thousand feet drilled. Show me the money!
In March 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to enter the public consciousness, some 500 people from labor unions and industry met in Pittsburgh to launch an organization called Pittsburgh Works Together (PWT), dedicated to fighting back against those who want to end southwest PA industries including steel, natural gas, and petrochemicals (see 
No doubt you heard about the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, a pipeline that flows a significant amount of refined products (gasoline and diesel fuel) from the Gulf Coast where it’s refined as far north as New Jersey. Most of the gasoline supply for states like North and South Carolina comes from the Colonial Pipeline. When the pipeline went offline for over a week, most gas stations in NC ran out of gas. It was panic city across the state. The outage pointed out the weakness of having most of a state’s supply of fuel provided by a single pipeline. Top officials in NC are equally (perhaps more) concerned that most of the state’s natural gas supply comes from a single interstate pipeline: the mighty Williams Transco pipeline.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: DeIuliis calls on companies to invest more on local economically disadvantaged parts of region; NATIONAL: February 2021 drop in U.S. ethane demand was largest monthly decline on record; U.S. Senate Republicans readying new infrastructure proposal; Hydrogen markets looking for regulatory attention; INTERNATIONAL: New IEA net zero roadmap undermines America’s energy security; US waives sanctions against Nord Stream 2 developers.