A new bill would impose a three-year moratorium on new plant construction in parts of Appalachia and the Gulf Coast.
JAMES BRUGGERS reports for Inside Climate News
Towers and tanks rise from the banks of the Ohio River 25 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, where Shell Polymers plans to produce 1.6 million metric tons of plastic pellets annually.
To the Trump administration, the petrochemical industry and regional economic development officials, this state-of-the-art petrochemical plant offers a glimpse of the new economy for a part of Appalachia devastated when the steel industry collapsed a generation ago.
Promoters of the Shell plant see it as the first among a number of new plastics manufacturers conveniently located amid thousands of fracking sites in the region’s Marcellus shale, a natural gas field that produces a massive amount of ethane. The gas is used in plastics production.
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The sites would be tied together by an expanding network of natural gas wells, processing facilities, pipelines and a giant underground storage facility, potentially funded in part by $1.9 billion in Trump administration loan guarantees.
As industry and local authorities count thousands of new jobs and millions in tax revenues, battle lines have been drawn. Scientists warn of premature deaths from air pollution. Environmentalists foresee a plastics climate bomb. And now congressional Democrats have entered the fray, proposing a three-year moratorium on all new plastics plant construction nationwide, while the National Academy of Science studies the consequences of such a build-out on health and climate change.
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