It’s Official: Belmont County Chosen as POSSIBLE Cracker Plant Site
As we told you Tuesday, Ohio is now squarely in the ethane cracker race (see Rumor: Ohio Cracker Plant Announcement Coming This Week). As predicted, yesterday Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Belmont County, OH officials announced a pair of companies from Thailand and Japan were partnering with the aim of building an ethane cracker plant in Belmont County (see the announcement below). It is a $5 billion project, according to media reports–larger than the price tag for both the possible Shell ethane cracker in Beaver County, PA and the Odebrect ethane cracker/petrochemical facility in Parkersburg, WV–which is now on pause (see Odebrect Pushes the Pause Button on WV Ethane Cracker). Speaking of which–you may now color us skeptical and jaded that any of these projects, including the one in Ohio, will ever get built…
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Earth Day was celebrated in 192 countries around the world yesterday, including the U.S. We celebrate old Mother Earth here at MDN HQ each and every day. We love this dirt ball on which we live. An MDN reader and friend sent us a link to a Youtube video that properly celebrates and provides context for Earth Day (watch it below). To properly celebrate Earth Day, you need to include a celebration of fossil fuels–which have done more to clean up the earth than any other factor. Yes, you read that right. Fossil fuels are the reason we have cleaner air, cleaner water and live longer than ever. So today, one day late, we celebrate “setting fire to corpses of animals and plants unearthed from 400 million-year-old cemeteries”–which is how anti-driller Sandra Steingraber describes fossil fuels…
As MDN told you last week, natural gas production in Pennsylvania went DOWN from January to February 2015 (see 
Wow–who woulda thunk? Drillers in West Virginia paid double the amount of revenue in severance taxes in 2014 than they did in 2013–a total of $188 million. Those numbers are approaching the total haul for the tax/impact fee in Pennsylvania (a little over $200 million each year). But there’s a big difference between the revenue raised in WV and PA. In PA, 60% of the revenue raised stays local with the towns and counties where drilling occurs, and 40% goes to the state and other geographies. We call the 40% “walking around money” (i.e. extortion) that politicians had to agree to in order to get any kind of deal done that remotely approaches common sense. In WV however, an eye-popping 90% of the severance revenue raised goes to the state–to disappear through politicians’ fingers–while a meager 7.5% stays in the counties that see drilling…
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 
How low will it go? Data from the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) shows a significant drop in the number of Marcellus Shale drilling permits issued for the first quarter of 2015. In fact, the number of permits issued dropped 30% in 1Q15–to the lowest number of permits issued in the past five years. Here’s a look at the numbers…