Free Republic

MOJAVE - Progress on rocket engine technology continues at XCOR Aerospace, as the company this week announced the successful completion of the first round of testing of its new 56-pound thrust rocket engine, the XR-3E17. The new engine is a direct descendant of the company's first "Tea Cart" engine, which debuted in 2000 and has been used as a demonstration model of the company's capabilities. "We needed a more updated engine," said Aleta Jackson, co-founder of the company, which is based at the Mojave Air and Space Port. The new engine provides nearly four times the thrust of the original...

POTTER TWP. — Shell Chemicals is hiring 40 production operators who will help run the company’s $6 billion ethane cracker plant once it’s operational early next decade. Spokesman Joe Minnitte said Tuesday that the job postings are the “first grouping” aimed at local residents who are interested in working at the plant in Potter Township. The production operators will monitor and control equipment and will also be expected to work in other operations there, according to the job posting. The posting noted that the production operator shifts will vary while the plant is starting up operations. For instance, operators will...

CLARINGTON — Mountaineer NGL Storage officials announced plans Thursday to spend $150 million — and potentially as much as $500 million — on its proposed natural gas liquids storage facility along the Ohio River near Clarington. By 2019, company Managing Director David Hooker hopes to store up to 420 million gallons of ethane, propane and butane in caverns along the river, with the goal of allowing the potential PTT Global Chemical cracker plant to access the product via pipelines that would only need to stretch about 10 miles. Also, the Mountaineer NGL Storage project could be the first part of...

CANONSBURG, Pa.–West Virginia University researchers believe a Marcellus and Utica shale ethane storage hub could help create $36 billion in investment and more than 100,000 permanent jobs — some of which could occur at industrial sites left behind by Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel, Weirton Steel and Ormet Corp. During a Tuesday conference, WVU Energy Institute Director Brian Anderson said drillers throughout the region are now producing about 460,000 barrels of ethane per day — almost three times the total amount of ethane expected to be used per day at the Royal Dutch Shell ethane cracker set for Beaver County, Pa. and the...

WHEELING — West Virginia’s congressional delegation is showing a unified front in pushing for an ethane storage hub for central Appalachia, and they hope state leaders in Ohio and Pennsylvania join them. U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., were joined Thursday by Rep. David McKinley, R-Wheeling, and American Chemistry Council President Cal Dooley for a news conference to tout the economic benefits of placing the hub near oil and gas reserves in Appalachia rather than near chemical industry operations on the Gulf Coast. Manchin and Moore, along with Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, last week introduced the...

The dozen or so cranes visible from Interstate 10 in Baytown will only remain for a few more months as Chevron Phillips Chemical's $6 billion petrochemical expansion moves toward completion. Chevron Phillips' complex is more than 80 percent complete, although it won't be fully operational for almost another year. The project involves a massive ethane cracker - on a plot the size of 44 football fields - that will separate a component of natural gas called ethane, which will provide the feedstock for some 1.5 million metric tons a year of ethylene, a common building block of plastics. Chevron Phillips,...

Royal Dutch Shell will build the multibillion-dollar petrochemical plant it proposed more than four years ago on the banks of the Ohio River in Beaver County. The decision announced early Tuesday ends years of anticipation and debate that swirled as Shell prepared the massive site in Potter and Center while a global collapse in oil and natural gas prices prompted the company to lay off thousands and halt other projects. “Shell Chemicals has recently announced final investment decisions to expand alpha olefins production at our Geismar site in Louisiana and, with our partner CNOOC in China, to add a world-scale...

The underlying economics are still good and the concept remains solid, but the prospect of finding enough qualified people to actually build and staff it is too daunting – at least for now. Such are the conclusions of Houston-based Appalachian Resins, Inc. (AR), whose board earlier this month decided to put its "less-than-world-scale" ethane cracker project in Monroe County, Ohio, on hold. "Looking at the timing, we are not able to get ahead of the two other projects," Bob Mifflin, AR's president, told Rigzone. The "two other projects" to which Mifflin refers are world-scale ethane crackers proposed by PTT Global...

Ohio is standing on third base and ready to cross home plate in the development of a proposed $5.7 billion ethane cracker plant in eastern Ohio, Gov. John Kasich said Thursday. Kasich joined the CEO of the Thai company that wants to build the plant in outlining plans for a $100 million outlay over the next year for engineering and design work at the site to determine the project's future. Columbus Business First broke the story in April that the plant was being considered in Belmont County, near the heart of oil and natural gas exploration in the Utica shale...

Formosa Petrochemical considering building $9.4B production complex in Louisiana STEVE SANOSKI SEPTEMBER 3, 2015 Taiwan-based Formosa Petrochemical Corp. is studying the feasibility of building a $9.4 billion industrial complex in St. James Parish to produce ethylene and other chemical products, company officials and Gov. Bobby Jindal announced this afternoon. A final investment decision is expected in mid-2016. If Formosa decides the investment makes financial sense, it would move forward with construction on the first phase of the project in late 2016, with hiring to begin in 2018. The project would create 1,200 new direct jobs paying an average annual salary...

North American chemical companies have seen their revenues slip with the plunging crude price, but they aren’t expected to abandon the billions worth of expansions they announced when profits were higher, a new report finds. Petrochemical companies have enjoyed deep discounts on the oil-based naptha and natural gas liquids they use to power their plants since the price of oil has collapsed in recent months, but chemicals they manufacture have also been selling for cheaper, eroding their margins, according to a new report by Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services. Ethylene, a key building block for plastics, now fetches 35 percent...

Royal Dutch Shell warned Gov. Tom Wolf that policies which hurt gas production could affect the company's decision on whether to build a multibillion-dollar plant in Beaver County to turn ethane into plastics, the head of a gas industry group said Wednesday. “I sat in a meeting with Gov. Wolf in August, where leadership from Shell looked the now-governor directly in the eye and said, ‘If you jeopardize the ethane supply, we likely don't invest here,' ” Marcellus Shale Coalition President David Spigelmyer told Tribune-Review editors and reporters. “That's a big deal. We need to make sure we have opportunities...

On Monday, the West Virginia Public Service Commission (PSC) approved the siting certificate for Moundsville Power LLC to construct a 549-MW combined cycle natural gas power plant in Marshall County. It will be the first to also burn ethane. The company is also touting the project’s role in helping to offset the effect of area coal plant closings. With the PSC approval in hand, Moundsville Power’s next step is financing. Construction is scheduled to begin in late 2015, and the plant is expected to be operational in early 2018. The Moundsville Power facility will be a wholesale generator for the...

Chevron Phillips Chemical is considering adding yet another expansion to its Baytown plant, joining a wave of other petrochemical companies scrambling to take advantage of cheap raw materials unleashed by the U.S. shale boom. The company, which is already building a $6 billion expansion at the same Cedar Bayou plant, this week said it’s studying how to increase the plant’s capacity to produce polyalphaolefins, synthetic lubricants used in high-performance motor oils. “There’s a pretty strong demand for that and fairly limited supply worldwide,” Mark Lashier, executive vice president of olefins and polyolefins, said in an interview with Fuel Fix. “It’s...

South African chemical company Sasol Ltd. has given final approval to move forward with an $8.1 billion ethane cracker and derivatives complex at its existing Lake Charles manufacturing facility, the company announced Monday. The ethane cracker will produce 1.5 million tons of ethylene every year. The process involves breaking down the molecules of ethane -- which is found in natural gas -- to create ethylene, a key ingredient for the petrochemical industry. It's used in products like food packaging, fragrances, detergents and tires. After clearing a key permitting hurdle earlier this year, the company said Monday it has given the...

Bill Gilliam and North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple announced two weeks ago that a venture called Badlands NGL is trying to build a petrochemical plant in North Dakota. The plant will use ethane, the cheap, abundant component of natural gas that rises from the same wells that produce oil in the Bakken. Natural gas in North Dakota is especially high in ethane content (see deck 39), and Gilliam thinks he can figure out a way to get enough of it in pure form to start cranking out train car loads of plastic beads for industrial use. A lot has to...

Propane demand (measured as product supplied) is expected to be 100,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) lower on average in 2014 compared to 2013 because of reduced demand from petrochemical plants, according to EIA's Short-Term Energy Outlook. In contrast to propane used as a heating fuel in buildings during colder months and as a crop-drying fuel during the harvest season, both of which are highly seasonal and weather dependent, petrochemical consumption of propane has relatively little seasonality. Beginning in mid-2013, higher propane prices reduced demand from petrochemical users. This decline is evident after accounting for the seasonal variation in annual consumption:...

Appalachian Resins, Inc. (AR) plans to lease approximately 50 acres of land in Salem Township, Ohio, to build an integrated 600 million pound per year ethylene/polyethylene production facility, the Houston-based firm announced in an emailed statement to DownstreamToday. "There is no difference in our development activities, we have essentially only moved across the Ohio River," James Cutler, AR's CEO, said Sunday after announcing his company's signing of a land lease letter of intent with the Monroe County (Ohio) Port Authority. "We will not be integrating with an existing operating (brownfield) facility but will be more of a 'greenfield' location. However,...

Houston-based pipeline company Enterprise Products Partners has signed a 30-year agreement with the Port of Houston Authority and will build its new ethane export facility at the Houston Ship Channel, company and port officials said Thursday. The company first announced plans for the project in April but didn’t say exactly where the facility would be located. The company said it expects the ship channel facility to be online by the third quarter of 2016. It said it already has contracts in place for some ethane customers and is in talks with others for the remaining capacity. The facility will have...

Enterprise Products Partners is planning to build an ethane export facility along the Gulf Coast in Texas, capable of loading 240,000 barrels per day of liquefied gas onto tankers headed for international buyers. The new export complex could help relieve a massive glut in U.S. ethane supplies, which Enterprise estimates could shoot past demand by 700,000 barrels per day by 2020. Ethane, a ubiquitous byproduct of the surge in North American energy production, is used as a feedstock for chemical plants like Dow Chemical’s planned ethylene complex in Freeport, Texas. “By providing new markets access to ethane, we are assisting...