Natural Gas Facilities in PA Raise Concerns Over Air Pollution
From StateImpact Pennsylvania comes an article about the plans to build large natural gas processing plants in different areas, and the concerns surrounding the operation of such facilities.
An excerpt:
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An excerpt:
So what do these natural gas crackers and splitters do? In a nutshell, they take natural gas by-products and turn them into the essential ingredients for plastics – things like ethylene and polypropylene. And those little polypropylene pellets get turned into the plastic bags we use to carry groceries.Read the rest of the article here.
Shell says the ethane cracker planned for Beaver County will produce more than a million tons of ethylene a year.
And with that comes potentially unhealthy, or carcinogenic levels of air emissions like carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, benzene and volatile organic compounds. David Hartley is with the Clean Air Council.
“Basically what that means is lots of increased ground level ozone and particulate matter,” says Hartley.
Hartley says Shell’s cracker emissions could rank up there with a large 500 megawatt coal burning power plant.
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