With a son majoring in chemical engineering at Purdue, I’m all for increasing our chemical plants. I just don’t want to become an extractive economy where our resources go to benefit the rest of the world just because we have a balance of payments issue. That’s not how to climb out of the hole.
Anecdotal evidence; a few years ago in rural Mississippi I saw a large amount of idle rolling stock that appeared to have been idle for some time, mostly plastic pellet containers. Was this a sign of decreased American production of finished plastic products, and would the natural gas boom reverse the trend? Normally I think of plastic as an oil byproduct.
I think of plastics as mostly coming from natural gas liquids. Some is from refineries as well.