MOSCOW (MRC) -- The international president of the United Steelworkers (USW) union, Thomas Conway, called for refinery and chemical plant workers to include decarbonization as part of contract proposals to be made to US oil companies in January, reported Reuters.
In remarks to the USW national oil bargaining policy conference, Conway said decarbonization projects should be viewed as necessary capital investment programs.
“Here sits the capital investment program that we need to keep our refineries up and running and keep the pressure off of them from the communities that would otherwise shut them down,” Conway said.
Officials from local unions representing 30,000 refinery and chemical plant workers are meeting online this week to develop proposals to be used in talks in January with Marathon Petroleum Corp, which is representing the nation’s oil companies for the first time.
Marathon, the nation’s largest refiner, was chosen to replace Shell Oil Co, the US arm of Royal Dutch Shell, which was the lead negotiator for the oil companies from the late 1990s through 2019. Shell has reduced the number of the refineries it operates in the United States and by the end of this year will operate only one plant.
The 2022 contract talks will come after national refining capacity fell 4.5% in the COVID-19 pandemic.
As MRC wrote before, in May 2021, Shell announced the sales of its Anacortes, Washington, US refinery as well as the controlling interest in the joint venture Deer Park, Texas, refinery. The company also sold its chemical refinery in Mobile, Alabama.
We remind that Royal Dutch Shell plans to reduce its refining and chemicals portfolio by more than half, it said in July 2020 without giving a precise timeframe. The move is part of the Anglo-Dutch company's plan to shrink its oil and gas business and expand its renewables and power division to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sharply by 2050.
Ethylene and propylene are the main feedstocks for the production of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,176,860 tonnes in the first half of 2021, up by 5% year on year. Shipments of exclusively low density polyethylene (LDPE) decreased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 727,160 tonnes in the first six months of 2021, up by 31% year on year. Supply of homopolymer PP and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased. Supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
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