According to industry officials, a large Chinese investment in West Virginia's energy industry in the United States may include plastic resin manufacturing projects.
On November 9, China Shenhua Energy Investment Group Co., Ltd. signed a memorandum with the U.S. government in Beijing that will invest 83.7 billion U.S. dollars in West Virginia in the next 20 years for the development of shale gas and the production of chemical products.
Details on chemical manufacturing have not been disclosed in a West Virginia Department of Commerce press release, but industry sources Keith Burdette told Plastics News that investment projects may include resin production, he said in a telephone interview on November 15 : 'If you look at the project upstream and downstream, the resin is a part of it.'
He is president of the West Virginia Regional Polymer Federation, which includes five county polymers and related businesses and units in the West Virginia region, and served as Secretary of Cabinet of West Virginia Department of Commerce from 2010 to 2016 In September this year, he served as president of the association.
At the press briefing, Burdette said the investment is "officially appealing" to prove that what we've done in the past, creating a good business climate to attract investment, is both appealing and successful, and is paying off for us. "
Officials at the state Department of Commerce said that China Shenhua chose West Virginia for investment because the region is an important source of energy and one of the largest shale gas reserves in the world. It is also a further extension of the long-established good cooperative relations between the two countries.
The parts of the Appalachia region, including parts of West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, are home to the region's shale gas-rich Maselas and Utica shale fields. Shell Chemical is already in the process of developing Large-scale petrochemical base to produce polyethylene resin in Monachka, Pittsburgh near Pennsylvania, and a second petrochemical base in southeastern Ohio will also be built.
West Virginia is expected to become the storage base of ethane, the precursor of polyethylene raw ethylene, Burdt said: "If we have built these storage facilities before, more projects will enter the West Virginia region. The country-level impact of building the Appalachian Storage Center will make our region a strategic economic engine. "
The 1,200-acre Shell project will eventually produce 3.5 billion pounds of high-density and linear low-density polyethylene and 3.3 billion pounds of virgin ethylene. The ethane feedstock comes from the large Massey gas field and is expected to open in the second half of 2021 or early 2022 Put into production.
Pennsylvania officials say 70% of North American high-density and linear low-density polyethylene producers are within 700 miles of Pittsburgh, where shale gas reserves are sufficient to support four ethylene producers and three in Marcellus, The other is located in the Utica area.
In Ohio, PTT Global Chemical of Thailand and Marubeni Japan formed a joint venture and is expected to soon set the end of the year to establish a petrochemical complex in Botticerton, a project announced in early 2015 that includes an ethane processing plant to produce ethylene Raw materials and resins and polyethylene.