6 Plastics

Atlantic

he gas industry has had plenty of practice making a case for itself. A few decades ago, when the U.S. as a whole was becoming more environmentally minded, the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency was eying the gas industry, and public-health research was beginning to suggest that gas stoves might be bad for health. In the 1970s and ’80s, the industry went on an offensive to downplay those dangers, using the same strategies, even the same PR firms, as the tobacco industry to avoid regulation, and was largely successful. Preserving demand for the product—gas stoves were “gateway” appliances that made a home more likely to have a gas furnace, a gas clothes dryer, and so on—was key.

The fracking boom supercharged that imperative, flooding the market with cheap gas. As hydraulic fracturing and horizontal-drilling technologies began liberating gas from hard-to-reach shale formations, production went way up. The U.S. natural-gas market was exploding with supply, which began to drive gas prices down. All that gas needed someplace to go.

But then a fortuitous pivot provided exactly that place: Ethane, a previously unusable waste product of natural-gas extraction, proved useful. In the past two decades, the industry has begun pouring resources into commercializing a method to “crack” ethane molecules, allowing them to be rearranged into ethylene, the main building block of plastics. The majority of petrochemical cracker plants built after 2012 were designed to use ethane. Drilling for “wet” gas—which is higher in ethane content, and therefore less useful as natural gas destined to be burned for fuel—became a profitable endeavor.

This ushered in the gas-for-plastic revolution: The industry envisioned a plastics boom, planning for ethane “cracker” plants all over the Ohio River Valley and the Gulf Coast. In 2018, the International Energy Agency predicted that petrochemical production—which is mostly plastic—would account for nearly half of all growth for fossil-fuel demand by 2050. As of February 2020, some 343 new plastic-production plants and expansions were permitted or planned in the U.S., according to the American Chemistry Council, a top trade group for American plastic companies. Shell’s cracker, a behemoth operation on a sprawling 384-acre campus, began operations last year, with its very own ethane pipeline snaking from the shale-gas fields to supply it. “What led the massive boom in the construction of new plastics facilities in the U.S. was not the emergence of massive public demand for plastics, but the fact that natural-gas feedstocks became incredibly cheap,” Carroll Muffett, the president of the Center for International Environmental Law, a nonprofit human-rights and environmental law firm, told me in 2020. “The fracking boom triggered the renaissance of the plastics industry in the U.S.”

Schlanger (2023) Hydrogen Is Just Another Hole for Natural Gas to Fill