Texas petrochemical plants turn ethane into building blocks of plastic

[thackney]

Texas petrochemical plants turn ethane into building blocks of plastic
https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Texas-petrochemical-plants-turn-ethane-into-13234903.php
September 17, 2018

...Mont Belvieu is built atop a salt dome formed more than 100 million years ago from deposits likely left by an ancient inland sea that cut across the North American continent. For more than 60 years, energy companies have used it as a natural storage tank, carving out salt caverns some 3,000 feet deep to hold millions of barrels of petroleum products.

Today, those caverns are increasingly filled with ethane and other natural gas liquids that feed the plastics and chemical industries, making Mont Belvieu and its neighbor to the south, Baytown, the focal point of the Gulf Coast petrochemical boom. Here, where rice fields once stretched as far as the eye could see, Exxon Mobil alone has invested some $6 billion to dramatically expand its 36-year-old plastics plant as well as its sprawling refining and chemicals complex in Baytown.

At these plants, the ethane molecules that squeezed through fissures in shale rock, flowed up a Texas well and traveled more than 150 miles by pipeline, will undergo chemical changes to transform them from once-overlooked byproducts of oil and gas drilling into one of most ubiquitous materials on earth. Hundreds of other pipelines stretching across Texas and beyond will carry millions more barrels of natural gas liquids from U.S. shale fields, converging near the salt dome under Mont Belvieu's Barbers Hill....

To read the rest of the story, continue online at HoustonChronicle.com.
PART 2
Petrochemical plants turn ethane into building blocks of plastic
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Geology-makes-region-the-focal-point-13225097.php

The first part of the series, How the ethane molecule changed the Gulf Coast — and the world, can be read here.
PART 1
How the ethane molecule changed the Gulf Coast — and the world
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/How-a-molecule-changed-the-Gulf-Coast-and-the-13225037.php

[thackney]

A lot of good detailed information in these articles, followed by more:

And then:
PART 3
From Houston to Asia and back, ethane's final form is packaging
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Free-ethane-molecules-make-journey-from-Texas-13225122.php

[IsailedawayfromFR]

That map of Texas sure looks like a healthy oil industry exists.

We should just stop at the borders and ship everything out by ship instead of pipeline.

[dfwgator]

[thackney]

That map of Texas sure looks like a healthy oil industry exists.

We should just stop at the borders and ship everything out by ship instead of pipeline.

Nah, pipelines are great.  They have paid a lot of my bills over the years.

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Nah, pipelines are great.  They have paid a lot of my bills over the years.

That may be, but there are many pipelines in Texas to keep you busy, am sure.

My memory recalls DC forcing Texans to subsidize other states under price controls for oil and gas.

Were you around during Carter's NGPA act where Texans paid several times the rates on natural gas in state than what other states had to pay when we shipped it out?

[thackney]

That may be, but there are many pipelines in Texas to keep you busy, am sure.

My memory recalls DC forcing Texans to subsidize other states under price controls for oil and gas.

Were you around during Carter's NGPA act where Texans paid several times the rates on natural gas in state than what other states had to pay when we shipped it out?

I was around but not yet in the industry.  I was getting ready to finish middle school.

[kidd]

Texas petrochemical plants turn ethane into building blocks of plastic

I designed a plant to do this as part of my senior year project to get my BS in Chemical Engineering in 1983

Punch cards used to run a computer program to design the reactor. Everything typed by hand. All hand-drawn figures.
I looked at the thick-book sized report 37 years later and I'm impressed. It even included an economic study (but no piping details)

[thackney]

I designed a plant to do this as part of my senior year project to get my BS in Chemical Engineering in 1983

Punch cards used to run a computer program to design the reactor. Everything typed by hand. All hand-drawn figures.
I looked at the thick-book sized report 37 years later and I'm impressed. It even included an economic study (but no piping details)

Very cool