U.S. Ethane, Including Marcellus/Utica, Now Supplies 4 Continents
One of the more interesting stories over the past year has been the export of Marcellus/Utica ethane to other countries, for use in their ethane cracker plants. Just last month we told you how northeast ethane gets transported to Texas, then loaded on Samsung ships and sails off to India (see Marcellus/Utica Ethane Heads to India via Texas on Samsung Ships). We spotted another article about U.S. ethane, who sells it and who (in the world) buys it. We don’t know for sure, but we’re guessing something approaching half of the ethane that gets exported now comes from our region–so the article below that details where the ethane ships from, and who buys it, is actually the story of Marcellus/Utica ethane…
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This story reaches back just a bit, but we found it interesting and instructive. On Thursday, Sept. 29, MarkWest Energy gave a tour of its facilities in eastern Ohio. Ethane was one of the big topics of discussion. During that discussion, MarkWest’s vice president of operations, Dave Ledonne, said this about the announced Shell and hopefully soon-to-be announced PTT Global ethane cracker plants: “The cracker plants are the end game. They are what we really need.” What did he mean?…
One of the largest banks in the world (#11) is the German-based Deutsche Bank. They have major branches in dozens of countries, including the U.S. The Equity Research – North America operation of Deutsche Bank attended the Platts 9th Annual Appalachian Oil & Gas Conference in Pittsburgh earlier this week. The DB analyst who attended wrote up notes and shared them. We found the writeup interesting and thought you would too…
In February MDN brought you exclusive news that Shell had begun approaching landowners in Beaver County to get them to sign easements for two ethane pipelines to feed the mighty cracker plant they plan to build in the county (see 
Question: How can your business take advantage of the development of a petrochemical industry in your backyard? That was the question and premise behind a new white paper/report from the Ben Franklin Shale Gas Innovation and Commercialization Center. The white paper, titled “Shell Petrochemical Complex (“Cracker”) Project Overview – The First Step in Establishing a Regional Petrochemical Sector” (full copy below) provides an excellent overview of the coming ethane cracker in Beaver County, PA–with details for how and who can benefit from it. The paper is mainly aimed at manufacturers that will be able to leverage the output from the plant–but there’s plenty of other great information in this paper to inspire and get your creative business juices flowing. Take time to download and read it. The future of your business may depend on it!…
At last year’s Utica Summit III event held in Stark, OH, Tom Gellrich of consulting firm TopLine Analytics, a company that “closely follows ethane markets,” said he thinks the first ethane cracker to get built will be the Shell cracker plant in Beaver County, PA. He was right. Shell announced their official decision to move forward earlier this year. At that same event Gellrich said he thinks the Marcellus/Utica region will see three, possibly four, ethane crackers built (see 
Sometimes the boneheaded decisions of others can benefit us. Take, for example, Scotland–where the government has placed a moratorium on fracking until…until the cows come home? Or is it sheep? The Swiss-based company INEOS is a young but rapidly growing chemical company with roughly $40 billion in sales per year. INEOS’ competitors would be companies like BASF, Bayer and Dow Chemical. INEOS has its fingers in a lot of pies. One of those pies is an ethane cracker plant in Grangemouth, Scotland. Because Scotland has not, and apparently will not, frack its own abundant, clean supply of natural gas (which would produce associated amounts of ethane), INEOS is forced to look elsewhere for large supplies of ethane–or shut the plant down. Rather than shut it down, INEOS has contracted with Marcellus/Utica drillers who send their ethane to the Marcus Hook refinery near Philadelphia where it then gets loaded onto ships the length of two football fields–to carry the ethane to places like Grangemouth. The first such shipment of Marcellus/Utica ethane heading to Grangemouth is set to arrive over the next few days. And Scotland’s tragic loss is our great gain, because INEOS has signed contracts to keep our ethane flowing to Grangemouth for the next 15 years…
This story is unbelievable on so many levels. A pointy-headed liberal who cloisters himself inside the insular Beltway of Washington, DC made a trip to Pittsburgh last week to talk to a small class of 70 students at Carnegie Mellon University. In this talk the lib proclaimed that the “incentives” provided by PA to Shell to lure a cracker plant to the state are, essentially, monies the state didn’t have to spend and a burden to the taxpayers of PA because Ohio and West Virginia may also reap some of the benefits of the cracker (without “paying” for it). The lib’s operating assumption is that 100% of everyone’s money belongs to the all-knowing government–including money made by big, evil corporations like Shell. He further states that by granting a few exemptions on taxes to Shell, PA is taking money out of the pockets of common folk. His philosophy and assumptions are so twisted it’s beyond belief. What’s more twisted is that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote a major story about the talk–as if it’s news…
