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The Dow Chemical Company said Friday it started commercial operations at its new propylene production facility in Freeport as Dow reiterates its commitment to the Texas Gulf Coast following news of its planned merger with DuPont. The massive propane dehydrogenation unit that makes propylene -- a core chemical building block of many plastics -- is located at Dow's Oyster Creek site in Freeport as part of Dow's $4 billion expansion in the area south of Houston. The plant can produce 750 kilotons of propylene a year. The growth is fueled by cheap natural gas from U.S. shale that serves as...

The general manager for a Royal Dutch Shell petrochemical plant in Louisiana said the company is committed to expanding its business along the Gulf Coast, with demand in Asia and the United States projected to continue growing. Houston-based Shell Chemical said Monday that the company will expand the petrochemical complex in Geismar, Louisiana to produce more chemicals used in plastics, industrial oils and drilling fluids as part of a $717 million investment. "It's a pretty big deal in our chemicals business. Our view is this project will be very profitable for Shell," Gesimar General Manager Rhoman Hardy said in an...

LyondellBasell Industries petrochemical giant said Thursday it plans to build a new plant near Houston at its Channelview complex that represents the company's largest capital investment ever. The PO/TBA plant would produce 900 million pounds of propylene oxide, 2 billion pounds of tertiary butyl alcohol and its derivatives annually. Propylene oxide is a chemical used to make everything from antifreeze to cosmetics. The tertiary butyl alcohol is a byproduct used as a solvent to make chemicals and gasoline additives. The move is part of the Gulf Coast's petrochemical boom that has seen companies taking advantage of cheap natural gas used...

Formosa Petrochemical considering building $9.4B production complex in Louisiana STEVE SANOSKI SEPTEMBER 3, 2015 Taiwan-based Formosa Petrochemical Corp. is studying the feasibility of building a $9.4 billion industrial complex in St. James Parish to produce ethylene and other chemical products, company officials and Gov. Bobby Jindal announced this afternoon. A final investment decision is expected in mid-2016. If Formosa decides the investment makes financial sense, it would move forward with construction on the first phase of the project in late 2016, with hiring to begin in 2018. The project would create 1,200 new direct jobs paying an average annual salary...

Engineering and construction companies must finally embrace technology in order to meet the demand of petrochemical and manufacturing projects along the Gulf Coast, industry experts said. There are $147 billion in petrochemical and manufacturing projects underway or planned in the U.S. through 2023, according to the American Chemistry Council, and most of the companies that will construct the projects are still failing to utilize technological advances that could speed things up, said John Fish, director of project support services for Louisiana-based Ford, Bacon & Davis engineering and construction firm. “Our industry — I hate to say it — we’re living...

While giant LyondellBasell has been expanding throughout the Houston area, CEO Bob Patel said the company is also looking to build a new polyethylene plant at one of its sites in southern Texas. Speaking at the Houston-based company’s sprawling Channelview complex where LyondellBasell will start up 250 million pounds of new ethylene capacity near the end of August, Patel said an announcement likely will come later this year on adding more production of polyethylene, the most common type of plastic. He said it could be a combination greenfield-brownfield project in the greater Houston region, but he noted that the region...

Yuhuang Chemical Inc., the Houston-based North American subsidiary of China-based Shandong Yuhuang Chemical Co. Ltd., has added 55 jobs to its corporate office in Houston and will continue to add more to support the development of its $1.85 billion methanol production complex in Louisiana. Yuhuang Chemical announced on Aug. 10 that it reached an agreement to transport gas on the Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line, owned by Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Williams Cos. Inc. (NYSE: WMB), to serve the methanol complex. In addition to serving Yuhuang chemical, the Transco pipeline system also serves the Sabine Pass liquefaction project under development by Houston-based Cheniere...

New plants coming online are set to drive industrial natural gas growth forward by more than three percent in the next two years, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in an analysis Wednesday. Industrial facilities, which include methanol and fertilizer plants, consumed an average of 21.0 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas in 2014, up 24 percent from 2009. By the end of 2015, that figure is expect to rise by another 3.4 percent to an annual average of 21.7 billion cubic feet per day. In 2016, the EIA predicted another 3.9 percent gain to 22.5 billion cubic...

U.S. chemical plants are expected to grow in the coming months as they take advantage of cheap natural gas prices and a strengthening economy that has boosted domestic demand for raw materials used in housing and automobiles, a new credit rating analysis finds. But falling oil prices and a strong U.S. dollar threaten earnings for several domestic chemical companies, according to an economic and ratings outlook compiled by Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services. Domestic chemical companies have been able to crank out chemicals at a lower cost because they rely primarily on natural gas to feed their operations while their...

Enterprise Products Partners said Thursday it would expand and retool two Gulf Coast petrochemical pipelines and build a new third line. Houston-based Enterprise said the new projects will bring the company’s polymer grade propylene distribution system to a total length of 587 miles and connect the system to more than 30 petrochemical facilities along the Gulf Coast. The system is fed by six propane/propylene fractionators at Mont Belvieu that Enterprise owns. Propylene is used as a feedstock for consumer plastics and other fibers, and comes in three grades. Refinery grade propylene is about 70 percent pure, chemical is 92-96 percent...

Industrial sector energy consumption is expected to grow faster than all other sectors, according to EIA's Annual Energy Outlook 2015. A large portion of both consumption and anticipated growth is in the bulk chemicals industry, which is able to take advantage of increased domestic supply of natural gas, hydrocarbon gas liquids (HGL), and petrochemical feedstocks. While some energy is used in the bulk chemical manufacturing process for heat and power, most energy in that industry is used as feedstocks, or raw materials used in the manufacture of chemicals. Most bulk chemicals are intermediate products used to produce final products such...

Celanese Corp. is considering expanding its South Texas chemical plant to produce methanol, the company has announced. Building a methanol unit at the plant in Bishop near Corpus Christi would be the latest move by the Dallas-based chemical company to capitalize on an abundance of cheap U.S. shale gas. Celanese has been building a new methanol unit in Clear Lake, southeast of Houston under a joint venture with Mitsui & Co., one of Japan’s largest generally traded companies. The project, which should be finished by October, will have the capacity to produce 1.3 million tons of methanol per year. Made...

Texas refineries churning out gasoline and diesel — and selling the bounty overseas in record levels — helped make the Lone Star State an export leader in 2014, according to new government data. About a fifth of Texas’ $289 billion in exported goods last year were petroleum and coal products — about $59.1 billion worth — according to a report from the Commerce Department and U.S. Trade Representative. “Texas is leading the way,” Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker told reporters on a conference call to discuss the report Thursday. “They support more than 1.1 million jobs through exports.” Other national leaders...

The petrochemical industry’s struggle to find enough welders, pipefitters and skilled laborers to build the billions in new projects slated for the Gulf Coast is a problem of its own making, the head of a construction education foundation said this week. Craft laborers require years of training to become minimally qualified and up to a decade or more to acquire the skills that make them top performers, but the industry has failed to consistently invest in developing that workforce, said Don Whyte, president of NCEER, which develops curriculum and assessments for construction and maintenance workers. “I’ve seen five or six...

The U.S. chemical industry is expanding at a healthy clip thanks to a domestic drilling renaissance that has flooded the world with cheap oil and gas. The industry grew by 2 percent this year and is expected to swell further next year as advances in drilling and completion technologies unlock vast new supplies of hydrocarbons that chemical companies rely on to make products and fuel their plants, according to the American Chemistry Council’s annual year-end review of the industry. “The wind is back in our sails,” Kevin Swift, chief economist for the trade group, said in a statement. “During the...

When Jack Ekstrom joined Whiting Petroleum Corporation in 2008, the company had 450 employees. Six years later, the company has 1,100 employees, said Ekstrom, vice president of corporate and government relations at Whiting. “At any given time, we have about 250 approved positions that we need to fill during a 12-month period,” Ekstrom said, “even though we are not recruiting for all of them at the same time.” Whiting Petroleum’s surge in hiring reflects a larger hiring boom within the oil and gas industry that is playing out across the nation. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that 119,800 people...

As refineries and petrochemical plants struggle to find enough skilled workers to fill a surge of new jobs, Dow Chemical is considering an old solution to solve a new problem. The multinational chemical corporation plans to launch a pilot apprenticeship program next year at eight of its plants, including manufacturing sites in Freeport, Bayport, Deer Park, Seadrift and Texas City. The company expects to hire 60 apprentices, who will receive two to four years of training and on-the-job experience to prepare them for jobs as chemical process operators, instrumentation and equipment technicians and analyzer technicians. The apprenticeship positions will be...

The surge of new construction projects in the petrochemical corridor east of Houston is pumping millions into local economies and adding thousands of new jobs, but also clogging area roadways and sending companies scrambling to find enough skilled workers. As chemical plants rush to take advantage of the cheap, abundant natural gas unleashed by the U.S. shale boom, industry and local communities like Baytown and Mont Belvieu have been forced to strike a delicate balancing act between embracing the flurry of new construction activity while maintaining good quality of life for residents. “We have problems 99 percent of the country...

U.S. energy exports, much of which come from the Houston region, represent a large chunk of the nation's overall export growth in the coming years, according to a new national HSBC Bank USA report. The banking report notes that Houston will see an additional job creation surge going forward partially because of energy exports that target emerging foreign markets. HSBC specially mentions that "chemical plant expansions and liquefied natural gas terminal upgrades, coupled with the opening of Mexico's energy industry to foreign investment, will result in a new export boom for Houston and will create more than 55,000 new jobs."...

Houston outpaced every city in the nation in annual wage growth during the second quarter, thanks largely to a bump in oil and gas-industry pay, according to PayScale. The Seattle-based pay tracker said the city’s 3 percent rise in annual wages beat the national average of 1.8 percent from April to June. That’s the second consecutive quarter that Houston wage-earners beat the national average, after a sluggish 2013 that saw pay in the energy capital flatten. (Average wage earners weren’t the only ones who had flat paydays last year: Some compensation packages for the chief executives of oil and gas...