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PA Gov. Wolf Talks to Shell About Beaver County Cracker Plant
PA Gov. Tom Wolf is bullish on the possibility of an ethane cracker coming to Beaver County, PA. He thinks a cracker is “inevitable.” In what can only be described as a faux pas for Wolf, he spoke about his love of a cracker yesterday, on Earth Day (oops). Earth Day is all about Democrats professing love of Mother Earth and hatred of fossil fuels. Must be Wolf didn’t get the memo. Wolf says he’s spoken to Shell muckety-mucks to let them know PA still wants a cracker. He said the Shell muckety-mucks say the project is “still on track” although there’s no timetable for a decision–which we take to mean no decision will be made for the foreseeable future…
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More troubling talk from Odebrecht about a proposed ethane cracker plant in Parkersburg, WV. In February, MDN brought you the first tremors in what until that point had been nothing but positive signs the project would move forward (see 
Last October MDN told you about the rumor that a pair of companies from Thailand and Japan were partnering with the aim of building an ethane cracker plant in the Marcellus/Utica region (see 
It’s always a sad day when we report a death related to the Marcellus/Utica industry. Thankfully it doesn’t happen often, but the fact it happens at all is almost too much to bear. We know it’s not realistic to expect no fatalities, but still… On Monday afternoon around 2:30 pm a worker at the former Marcus Hook refinery–which is being converted into a natural gas liquids terminal–was killed after a pylon fell on him. The worker’s name has not yet been released, but it is reported he was in his 50s and from New Jersey and worked for engineering firm AECOM, a contractor working at the site. In a profoundly inappropriate manner, a member of the anti-drilling group Protecting Our Waters jumped on the death as an opportunity to push her anti-drilling message…
We understand it’s a really big commitment to decide to spend $2 billion or more on a single project, like the Shell ethane cracker plant announced in June 2011 that may (or may not) be coming to the Marcellus (see 
Calling OH Gov. John “foreigner hunter” Kasich. We have an infraction! Quick! You’re needed, stat. Word has leaked out that MarkWest Energy has not only reduced the number of union members they’re using on jobs in Harrison County, OH, they’re using non-union (gasp) out-of-state workers–from exotic places like Texas and Louisiana and Oklahoma. Those places have been defined by John Kasich as “foreign” locations (i.e. non-Ohio). Periodically the jingoist-in-chief gets on his high horse and goes riding after those darned foreigners (see