Baytown-West Chambers County Economic Development Foundation | 1300 Rollingbrook Dr., Suite 610 | Baytown, TX 77521 | 281.420.2961 | baytownedf@baytownedf.org

Texas petrochemical plants turn ethane into building blocks of plastic

September 17, 2018

MONT BELVIEU - They say geography is destiny, but in this small city east of Houston, the force shaping its history, economy and future is geology.

Mont Belvieu is built atop a salt dome formed more than 100 million years ago from deposits likely left by an ancient inland sea that cut across the North American continent. For more than 60 years, energy companies have used it as a natural storage tank, carving out salt caverns some 3,000 feet deep to hold millions of barrels of petroleum products.

Today, those caverns are increasingly filled with ethane and other natural gas liquids that feed the plastics and chemical industries, making Mont Belvieu and its neighbor to the south, Baytown, the focal point of the Gulf Coast petrochemical boom. Here, where rice fields once stretched as far as the eye could see, Exxon Mobil alone has invested some $6 billion to dramatically expand its 36-year-old plastics plant as well as its sprawling refining and chemicals complex in Baytown.

At these plants, the ethane molecules that squeezed through fissures in shale rock, flowed up a Texas well and traveled more than 150 miles by pipeline, will undergo chemical changes to transform them from once-overlooked byproducts of oil and gas drilling into one of most ubiquitous materials on earth. Hundreds of other pipelines stretching across Texas and beyond will carry millions more barrels of natural gas liquids from U.S. shale fields, converging near the salt dome under Mont Belvieu's Barbers Hill.

"All roads lead to Texas," said Kim Haas, Exxon Mobil's operations manager, "and specifically the Baytown area."

*This is a 3-part series that can be read online at Houston Chronicle

By Jordan Blum, Houston Chronicle
https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Texas-petrochemical-plants-turn-ethane-into-13234903.php?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Chron_fuelfix