Shell Cracker Construction Starting Soon; Concrete Plants Ramp-up
One of our fun pastimes is speculating about when, exactly, the mighty Shell ethane cracker in Beaver County, PA will actually go online. In February, Shell CEO Ben van Beurden said this: “We haven’t announced exactly when it will start up, but expect that to be not anymore this decade” (see Shell CEO Says PA Cracker Up & Running “Not Anymore This Decade”). What did the non-native English-speaking van Beurden mean? Your guess is as good as ours. Did he mean “by the end of this decade,” or “not by the end of this decade”? Our best guess is that the cracker won’t be operating until 2020 or 2021–that is, the latter meaning. We have some evidence to support that theory. Two concrete plants are due to begin construction any day now, being built by Champion Concrete. The two plants, which will manufacture all of the concrete used in the cracker, are scheduled to be completed and in operation by July. So concrete for the project begins to flow in July. The useful life of the two plants (for manufacturing concrete for the cracker) is three years. Three years from this summer will be the summer of 2020. Important note to supply chain businesses: as the concrete plants and construction activity ramps up, there’s opportunity to sell more of your goods and services to this enormous project. The number of workers at the site will steadily increase this year and next…
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Across the Keystone State (i.e. Pennsylvania), the shale revolution is “boosting agriculture,” says a farm expert. How? By providing new sources of capital (cash) to buy new equipment, more livestock, fix buildings, etc. Shale is also lowering the cost of fuel and fertilizer for farmers. And it provides jobs for members of farming families–bringing in an important new income stream. It is not an overstatement to say that shale is literally saving the family farm in PA…
Ohio Gov. John “severance tax” Kasich is Johnny One Note when it comes to his desire to tax the Utica Shale industry and transfer their hard-earned money away to other people who didn’t earn it. In January, Kasich announced he would obstinately include a nosebleed-high Utica Shale severance tax (6.5%) in his biennium budget–again (see 
Finally, something is being done about draining the swamp that has been (until now) a rogue, out-of-control federal Environmental Protection Agency. As we previously reported, Trump could not have picked a better person to head the agency than Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (see 
Domtar Corporation designs, manufactures, markets, and distributes pulp, paper, and personal care products from facilities in Elk and Clearfield counties in North Central Pennsylvania. PA Gov. Tom Wolf’s office excitedly announced yesterday that the company has decided to stay in PA and not move, making “significant infrastructure and equipment upgrades at its facilities.” The decision means that 438 jobs will stay in the Keystone State rather than move elsewhere–good for Pennsylvania. Which is all mildly interesting. However, the primary reason they’re sticking around is what caught our eye: the operation is converting from burning coal for energy to burning clean, cheap Marcellus Shale gas. The PA Commonwealth Financing Authority is kicking in $1 million from the Pipeline Investment Program (PIPE) grant fund to pay for a three-mile natural gas pipeline to Domtar’s Elk County paper mill facility…
This story is deliciously ironic. New York State under man-child Gov. Andrew Cuomo has refused to allow hydraulic fracturing in unconventional shale deposits, although there is still fracking in conventional wells (see 
In the past MDN has highlighted the great work done by the Norton Rose Fulbright (NRF) law firm, most recently just last month (see 
A couple of times we’ve highlighted the great work done by the Norton Rose Fulbright law firm, most recently just last month (see 
T. Boone Pickens, a Texas oil man (pronounced “aaalll man” in Texas) needs no introduction. In a post on LinkedIn, Boone offers some great advice to the incoming President-elect Donald Trump on how The Donald can make America great again, using domestic energy resources. Boone’s plan has two parts: (1) Don’t screw up what we have going for us. (2) Don’t settle for what we’ve done so far. Here’s some great insights from someone The Donald should listen to…
A new study by researchers at the University of Chicago, Princeton University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) finds that the benefits of fracking outweigh the costs. You read that right. Three big lefty schools have released a study saying fracking benefits everyone. “The Local Economic and Welfare Consequences of Hydraulic Fracturing” (full copy below) looked at nine different shale basins. The authors say fracking activity yields $1,300 to $1,900 per year on average to each household in those basins. That’s a $64 billion yearly benefit–from fracking. So says the libs. Fracking benefits include, “a 7 percent increase in average income, driven by rises in wages and royalty payments, a 10 percent increase in employment, and a 6 percent increase in housing prices.” It is the largest and most comprehensive study of its kind…
New research from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) reveals a couple of astonishing facts: From 2012-2014, hydraulic fracturing was responsible for creating $3.5 trillion worth of new wealth. We can’t even get our brains around that number! Another fact: From 2012-2014, fracking create 4.6 million new jobs. Although we’ve experienced a big downturn since 2014, can you imagine how the fracking industry will come back under President Trump? Happy day are here again! More from the latest research report by NBER, titled “Fracking, Drilling, and Asset Pricing: Estimating the Economic Benefits of the Shale Revolution”…
The London School of Economics recently released a research study that prominently features the Marcellus/Utica. In “On the Comparative Advantage of U.S. Manufacturing: Evidence from the Shale Gas Revolution” (full copy below), the authors find America’s shale revolution is revitalizing American manufacturing. If we could vastly simplify the research in just a few words, it is this: While we have enough shale gas to export plenty of it, exporting it is not as economic as exporting oil due to the elaborate processes to liquefy and regassify natural gas–therefore a lot of the gas stays right here at home, making the U.S. one of (if not the) cheapest places on the planet to establish manufacturing plants, especially for manufacturers that use natural gas and NGLs (natural gas liquids). Therefore, manufacturing, especially in the petrochemical sector, is ramping back up in the U.S. The authors cite a study that says for every two jobs created by the fracking industry, another one job is created in the manufacturing sector. The paper also concludes that the shale revolution saved Obama’s bacon by creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. Without shale drilling we would not have recovered as quickly as we did from the economic near-collapse of 2007/2008. Here’s a summary of the research, followed by a full copy of the published paper…