The Shell facility opening soon has been granted a permit to emit more volatile organic compounds than the Clairton Coke Works, a notorious
By Jon Hurdle, Inside Climate News
Fifteen years after Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry began to raise worries about air and water pollution, the industry’s critics now fear a new source of harmful emissions from the fledgling petrochemical industry, which is poised to become a major customer for the state’s abundant gas reserves.
In a state that has long nurtured the extraction of oil, coal, and now gas, environmentalists warn that a vast new Shell plant on the banks of the Ohio River 30 miles north of Pittsburgh will add to air and water problems in a region that has endured decades of pollution from the steel and coal industries.
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The plant, which is expected to open before the end of 2022, will convert ethane, a form of natural gas, into ethylene, a building block for plastics. The operation will produce millions of tons of tiny plastic pellets called “nurdles” which opponents predict will leak into the Ohio River and beyond during shipment, and will contribute to a flood of plastics that are polluting the world’s oceans and clogging landfills.
After being lured to Pennsylvania with the promise of $1.6 billion in state tax credits, and being awarded a state air permit to issue more volatile organic compounds than that emitted by the Clairton Coke Works, a notorious local polluter, the “cracker” plant appears to be getting the same easy ride from state officials as the fracking industry did starting in the mid-2000s, critics say.
The Shell plant, in Monaca, will take ethane, a liquid hydrocarbon separated from fracked natural gas, and “crack” its molecules to make ethylene and polyethylene resin pellets called nurdles, which are melted down and turned into all things plastic, from bottles to car parts.
“We are seeing a lot of these things repeat themselves with the cracker, and with the specter of petrochemical development in the region,” said Alison Steele, executive director of the Environmental Health Project, a nonprofit that has been monitoring the health impacts of the region’s natural gas industry, and representing affected residents, since 2012.
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