What the Shell Cracker Plant Looks Like: The Visible and Invisible
Anya Litvak | October 2, 2022 | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
How residents of Beaver County will experience the new Shell petrochemical complex in Potter Township depends on a lot of things. The time of day. The particular equipment that’s churning or not churning inside the fenceline of the sprawling industrial site that spans nearly 400 acres on the Ohio River. Whether the trains that will carry plastic pellets to customers are running.
Shell, a Dutch energy and petrochemicals giant, built the complex in Beaver County because it sits on top of one of the largest reserves of natural gas in the world, the Marcellus and Utica shales.
That gas, in some areas, is rich with natural gas liquids. One of them, ethane, will be piped to the plant and then cracked in furnaces where it will emerge as ethylene. Three other units on the site will process that ethylene into polyethylene pellets, which will be sent to Shell’s customers to be fashioned into anything from car parts to diapers.
The whole endeavor took six years to stand up and cost more than $6 billion to build, with up to 9,000 construction workers giving way to 600 permanent jobs.
As the facility continues to ramp up to begin commercial operations, researchers are ramping up surveillance of health, air and water around the plant.
The University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Healthy Environments and Communities has launched a health survey for residents of Beaver County.
The Three Rivers Waterkeeper, a Pittsburgh nonprofit, has been sampling the water up and downstream of the plant to establish a baseline by which it will judge if Shell’s operations will change the concentration of plastic nurdles found in the region’s rivers.
On the evening of Sept. 27, during a webinar organized by the group Beyond Plastics, Heather Hulton VanTassel, executive director of Three Rivers Waterkeeper, held up lab results from recent water tests. It showed columns of “non-detect” levels of organic compounds and hydrocarbons.
“This is a great place to start off,” she said.
The state Department of Environmental Protection has an air monitor set up at Beaver Valley Mall in Monaca that takes hourly readings of particulates, volatile organic compounds, ozone and other pollutants. The data is posted at the state agency’s website.
Alison Steele, executive director of the Environmental Health Project, encouraged community members to monitor AirNow, an air-quality forecast from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and PurpleAir, which aggregates data from private air sensor units into a real-time air quality map.
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