Shell Officials Optimistic Cracker Plant Will Attract New Business
Earlier this week, Shell announced its mighty ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, PA (near Pittsburgh) is finally, ten years after first announcing, fully operational and producing plastic pellets (see Shell Officially Launches Pa. Cracker Plant Using M-U Ethane). Part of the raison d’etre for granting the plant a $1.7 billion break on taxes for 25 years is to lure manufacturers (and investments, and jobs) to locate nearby, in PA (see Gov. Corbett’s PR Campaign for $1.7B Cracker Plant Tax Break). So far, frankly, that hasn’t happened. At least not in a big way. But don’t worry, says Shell execs. They are “optimistic” the region will attract new manufacturing plants that want to use Shell’s plastic pellets.
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Anti-fossil fuelers continue to pressure the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (and Pennsylvania itself) over the grievous sin of approving the Shell ethane cracker plant project (see 
Another weak and pathetic number of new shale drilling permits were issued for the week of Oct. 17-23 in the Marcellus/Utica. Pennsylvania had only 10 new permits, with six of them going to Range Resources in Beaver County. Ohio had just one new permit, for Southwestern Energy in Monroe County. And West Virginia had a big, fat, goose egg. No new permits. Bummer.
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) has assessed a $670,000 fine plus extra “cost recovery” charges of nearly $30,000 against the Shell Pipeline Company for work done between 2019 and 2021 on Shell’s Falcon ethane pipeline project. The DEP says that a series of inspections showed “failure to comply” with this paperwork requirement and that paperwork requirement. There were a few instances of erosion into “waters of the commonwealth.” But in the end, the DEP acknowledges, “no visual aquatic impacts were observed.” No muddy water. No dead fishies. No dead salamanders. No dead nothing. In other words, the DEP fined Shell for nothing–no lasting impacts on the environment from the work done to construct the Falcon pipeline.
The mighty Shell ethane cracker complex in Monaca (Beaver County), PA, is due to come online any day now. In fact, with such a large and complex facility, it is already “coming online” gradually and has been since August (see 
In June, a Shell executive told the Appalachian Energy Innovation Collaborative conference that the company’s Pennsylvania ethane cracker project was 98% done and would be fully online within “a couple of months” (see 
PennEnergy Resources recently reapplied (for a second time) for a permit to draw water from Big Sewickley Creek–but this time the request is cut in half, to just 1.5 million gallons of water a day (see 
PennEnergy Resources recently reapplied (for a second time) for a permit to draw water from Big Sewickley Creek–but this time the request is cut in half, to just 1.5 million gallons of water a day (see 
One of the big promises of building a multi-billion dollar ethane cracker plant project is its ability to act like a magnet attracting other petrochemical and manufacturing plants to locate near it, using the outputs of the ethane cracker as their inputs. According to an article appearing in the Pittsburgh Business Times, the great promise of attracting more businesses to the southwestern PA region with the construction of the Shell cracker plant has not, so far at least, resulted in a big influx of new businesses.