Shell Cracker chemical plant will release a large excess of dangerous volatile organic compounds (VOCs)
Donald Trump is coming to tour the Beaver, PA petrochemical cracker plant on Tuesday, August 13th as a campaign move. There will be a non-violent protest to show that there are many people who oppose this plant and the industry. We will be car pooling from John Marshall High School in Glen Dale, WV. We will have a time on MONDAY. It will most likely be sometime in the late morning/afternoon. Please RSVP as soon as possible if you would like to join. Just reply to this email!
Thank you for your concerns and activities,
Bev Reed, Sierra Club Intern
Beyond Dirty Fuels Campaign
reed.b1@yahoo.com
www.nocrackerplantOV.com
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Shell cracker plant will bring pollutants
Letter to Editor, Beaver County Times, August 3, 2019
A sign outside the Vanport Township Hot Dog Shoppe says, “The secret of freedom is courage.” I would add “honesty” so that it would read, “The secret of freedom is honesty and courage.”
Many hope that the ethane cracker plant being built in Potter Township will bring prosperity to Beaver County, and it takes courage to disagree. Why question Shell Chemicals’ promise that 600 permanent jobs will be created, and that the spinoff from those jobs as well as the construction jobs will lift Beaver County into prosperity?
The first reason to question Shell’s claims is people’s health. Shell itself tells us that its emissions will include annually 1,012 tons of carbon monoxide, 159 tons of fine particulates, 522 tons of volatile organic compounds and 2.25 million tons of carbon dioxide.
People are going to get sick, especially children, smokers, and elderly people. More people will have asthma and other lung diseases. There will be more heart attacks and cancers of all kinds.
Second, this region can present itself as a beautiful place to be, live and work. But with such pollutants relentlessly billowing from the south bank of the Ohio River, that claim will be empty.
Finally, the promised jobs are so few. There are better ways to encourage job production than giving a huge international polluter $1.65 billion in tax breaks.
Go look at the sign outside the Hot Dog Shoppe. Think about courage and honesty, and about freedom.
Nora Johnson, Pittsburgh
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Community outreach in WV and PA some 35 years after Bhopal, Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) …… (long and detailed article)
SHELL CHEMICAL is 7 years into a community liaison program for an ethylene cracker it began building a year and a half ago on the Ohio River near Pittsburgh. New to the region, with the first petrochemical plant accessing ethane from the Marcellus Shale natural gas reserve, Shell will be relying on community outreach know-how that the industry has garnered over decades.
Some 200 mi (322 km) south, companies in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia, host to scores of chemical operations since World War I, have confronted the challenge of opening up to communities and organizing outreach since the 1980s.
Shocked into taking action by the deadly 1984 accident at a chemical plant in Bhopal, India—a sister facility to one in West Virginia—companies in the region became pioneers in a global industry-improvement program called Responsible Care. In the 35th anniversary year of the Bhopal explosion, C&EN traveled to Pennsylvania and West Virginia to assess the current state of community relations in the chemical industry.
The disaster’s legacy remains a work in progress at the interface of the chemical industry and the public, by Rick Mullin.
AUGUST 12, 2019 | APPEARED IN C&EN, VOLUME 97, ISSUE 32
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Comments of Donna Willis Regarding C&EN Article
Submitted to C&EN Web-Site, August 13, 2019 at 12:09 AM
One statement on this article’s content is made by Ken Moseley who stated that the “community and industry must co-exist”. I strongly disagree and wish his statement had been made in my presence.
The chemical industry has such to answer for, and if we continue to allow such industries to operate in communities that have repeatedly suffered behind imprisonment in our homes behind plant production mishaps, the inability of seniors and poor households who do not have the means to escape when instructed by State and County officials, living with constant fear based on numerous explosions, constant misinformation regarding chemical identification released and the adverse impact on residence health, environment (air, water and soil), to coexist equals a death sentence and long duration sicknesses.
Mr. Moseley is living a fantasy but readily admits our residents will unlikely be employed by such industries but employed in lessor wage paying offsets. In otherwords, disrupt our lives, destroy our health, run us out of our homes when accidents take place on plant property and we will coexist because….what? Jobs!
The chemical industry and communities such as Institute will never coexist. We’ll die out (sic) and they’ll buy up the land they polluted and still people will become sick, suffer and die and no one will be held responsible. The wealthy industrialists will get richer on the backs of the slaves America has made of those industries neighbors.
Hard to justify gas-related tax incentive
From the Editorial Board, Citizen’s Voice, Wilkes-Barre, Penna., October 11, 2019
Apparently motivated by a massive state tax giveaway in Western Pennsylvania to one of the world’s largest and wealthiest corporations, some state legislators want to lavish more incentives on gas-related enterprises, including in Northeast Pennsylvania.
Royal Dutch Shell, the world’s fourth largest company with an estimated market value of $272 billion, is constructing a petrochemical refinery in Beaver County to take advantage of the site’s proximity to vast amounts of “wet” natural gas from the Marcellus Shale. It will break down, or “crack” ethane from the gas stream to produce plastics that can be used in innumerable applications.
The state government has committed a record $1.7 billion in tax incentives to Shell to build the plant, final costs for which will fall somewhere between $6 billion and $10 billion, according to an array of industry estimates. Shell reported 2018 profits of $21.4 billion.
Recently the state Housed a bill that would provide whopping tax incentives of up to 20% for companies that build large, gas-based manufacturing plants for materials such as fertilizer.
Democratic state Rep. Marty Flynn of Scranton claims that several companies have scouted Lackawanna County’s Upvalley region as a potential site for a plant or plants, and that final passage of the massive tax incentive bill will help drive their decisions.
To qualify, a company would have to invest at least $1 billion in a new plant.
The rush to forfeit potential state tax revenue raises the question of why it is necessary, if proximity to the needed gas is the key to the manufacturing processes involved.
State legislators have created a scenario under which they refuse to impose a modest extraction tax on natural gas while readily forfeiting other potential state revenue to create huge markets for the gas industry.
It’s time for them to cut in all state taxpayers by creating a fair extraction tax comparable to those imposed on the industry in other tax-producing states. That would convert the race from one to give away the store to one to ensure that the entire commonwealth benefits from the growing enterprise.
https://www.citizensvoice.com/opinion/hard-to-justify-gas-related-tax-incentive-1.2543916
1± Mile from Cracker Plant – 5.25 Acre, 26,000 SF Industrial Site for Lease
R. T. Walker, Real Estate Broker, CBRE, LLC
https://cbreemail.com/rv/ff011624e7988c03f92a89548840b5edfd59d256