Michael Butler: Shell ethylene cracker complex shows value of never giving up

The French writer Victor Hugo once called perseverance “the secret of all triumphs.” Those words came to mind as I read that Shell this year expects to open its estimated $10 billion ethylene cracker complex in Beaver County outside Pittsburgh.

It’s been a decade since the company announced the site and six since it decided to build the huge facility that will employ at least 600 full-time workers and become a tremendous economic catalyst to a region hurt by the steep decline of manufacturing jobs and once-thriving mining towns. I first wrote an opinion piece supporting it more than eight years ago.

But seeing this process through to completion has required patience and a long memory.

The Shell plant was at one time the country’s largest construction project and even so, it faced misguided opposition. It has weathered criticism and concerns the company worked to address; the covid-19 pandemic that shut construction down, and even market predictions that the plastics industry was overbuilding facilities as prices fell.

It has been under construction long enough to have generated a bit of country music lore — West Virginia country singer Charles Wesley Godwin wrote the “Cranes of Potter” about a woman whose buried bones were found during excavation for the plant.

To those activists who belittle large infrastructure project jobs as “temporary,” Beaver County shows the reality of it. The plant created an economic boon that generated 9,500 construction jobs at its peak and sustained many other jobs in the area and beyond.

For years. Not months, not weeks.

Investments of this scale are like throwing a boulder into a pond — the economic ripples keep coming.

A Robert Morris University School of Business economic impact study from last year forecasts that the plant will generate an estimated $3.7 billion annual contribution to statewide economic activity. The report indicates that over the expected 40-year lifespan of the complex, it will provide:

• $260 million-$846 million in annual economic activity in Beaver County alone, with local wage tax receipts of $550,000-$902,000.

• $3.3 billion in annual economic activity in the 10 counties around the plant — Allegheny, Armstrong, Butler, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Lawrence, Washington and Westmoreland.

• $23 million in additional state income tax annually.

• An estimated 11,200 new jobs expected statewide as a result of the project, anticipated to create nearly $82 billion in value from ongoing operations.

Energy and manufacturing has been a vital part of Beaver County and the region’s history and economy. The county was at the center of our country’s early 20th century industrial renaissance with its coal production and Ohio River steel mills. It became the birthplace of commercial nuclear power with the Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Station’s inauguration in 1957 at Shippingport. The shale revolution that began in 2008 also began to reignite local economies, and the natural gas from the Marcellus Shale will power the Shell plant.

Soon, the Shell plant will inaugurate another era of industrial progress and job creation in Pennsylvania and demonstrate that perseverance pays.

Michael Butler is Mid-Atlantic director for the Consumer Energy Alliance.