Texas petrochemical plants turn ethane into building blocks of plastic
https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Texas-petrochemical-plants-turn-ethane-into-13234903.phpSeptember 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....
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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.phpThe 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