Free Republic

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,...

Digging this summer at the ruins of a 1700 B.C. Canaanite palace in northern Israel, archaeologists struck wine. Near the banquet hall where rulers of a Middle Bronze Age city-state and their guests feasted, a team of American and Israeli researchers broke through to a storage room holding the remains of 40 large ceramic jars. The vessels were broken, their liquid contents long since vanished — but not without a trace. A chemical analysis of residues left in the three-foot-tall jars detected organic traces of acids that are common components of all wine, as well as ingredients popular in ancient...