$200 Billion In Planned NG Pipelines, Plants Mean US Will Swamp The World With Fracked Plastic
The petrochemical industry anticipates spending a total of more than $200 billion on factories, pipelines and other infrastructure in the United States that will rely on shale gas, the American Chemistry Council announced in September. Construction is already underway at many sites.
This building spree would dramatically expand the Gulf Coast’s petrochemical corridor (known locally as “Cancer Alley”) — and establish a new plastics and petrochemical belt across states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
If those projects are completed, analysts predict the United States would flip from one of the world’s highest-cost producers of plastics and chemicals to one of the cheapest, using raw materials and energy from fracked gas wells in states like Texas, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Those petrochemical plans could have profound consequences for a planet already showing signs of dangerous warming and a cascade of other impacts from climate change.
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In November 2017 the China Energy Investment Corp. signed a “memorandum of understanding” with West Virginia that would result in the construction of $83.7 billion in plastics and petrochemicals projects over the next 20 years in that state alone — a huge slice of the $202.4 billion U.S. total. Those plans have run into snags due to trade disputes between the United States and China and a corruption probe, though Chinese officials said in late August that investment was moving forward. The petrochemical industry’s interest is spurred by the fact that the region’s Marcellus and Utica shales contain significant supplies of so-called “wet gas.” This wet gas often is treated as a footnote in discussions of fracking, which tend to focus on the methane gas, called “dry gas” by industry — and not the ethane, propane, butane and other hydrocarbons that also come from those same wells.
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https://therevelator.org/plastics-fracking-climate/
