MOSCOW (MRC) -- Shell Chemicals has been making progress on a petrochemicals complex designed to leverage affordable feedstocks from Northeast US shale-gas plays, as per Plastemart.
The company has been "ramping up construction" at the site in Potter Township, Pennsylvania, in the Pittsburgh area that will produce 1.6 mln m tpa of polyethylene, Shell CEO Ben van Beurden said in a conference call. "We are working our way through regulatory approval," he said. "A lot of site preparation is already done."
Shell has not set a startup date but has previously targeted early 2020s.
The location of the project is unique, as recent waves of US ethylene and polyethylene projects have almost exclusively targeted the US Gulf Coast. The site will represent the largest ethylene and polyethylene capacities in the region, but Shell pointed to significant advantages in the location.
Shell expects to feed the steam cracker with affordable ethane sourced from the Marcellus and Utica shale basins. Additionally, more than 70% of North American polyethylene demand stands within a 700-mile radius of Pittsburgh, according to Shell.
We remind that, as MRC informed before, in October 2016, Royal Dutch Shell signed a preliminary memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Iran’s National Petrochemical Co. (NPC) for cooperation in the petrochemical industry, the Iranian oil ministry’s news agency SHANA reported.
Royal Dutch Shell plc is an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom. It is the biggest company in the world in terms of revenue and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors". Shell is vertically integrated and is active in every area of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading.
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