Shell likely to announce US cracker location in January

17 November 2011 14:52  [Source: ICIS news]

HOUSTON (ICIS)--Shell expects to announce the location of its proposed world-scale ethane cracker complex in the northeast of the US in January, a company spokeswoman said on Thursday.

“We hope to make a decision by year-end on the site and likely would announce it in January,” Houston-based Shell spokeswoman Alexandra Smith told ICIS.

Smith was commenting on an industry report released on Thursday that cited a Shell executive as saying that the company had short-listed a number of possible sites in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Last month, Brian Davis, Shell’s head of base chemicals, told ICIS that Shell had narrowed its options down to a handful of sites on either side of the Ohio River. The options include former steel and coal manufacturing sites.

Shell’s cracker will tap into feedstock made available from Shell’s shale gas acreage in the Marcellus field, which extends through West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, Canada-based NOVA Chemicals has contracted with producers in the Marcellus Shale to ship ethane to its petrochemicals complex at Corunna in southern Ontario. NOVA's Corunna cracker is only about 300 miles (483km) from the Marcellus formation.

Additional reporting by Nigel Davis and Sheena Martin

For more on Shell and other producers, visit ICIS company intelligence

By: Stefan Baumgarten
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