Shell Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex

The location of the plant has had a long history as an industrial site. Both Horsehead Corporation and Koppers had plants on the site; Koppers unofficially incorporated the area as Kobuta. Before its industrial use, the area had been farmland owned by a local family, which included a private cemetery (albeit with unmarked graves) that was discovered after Shell purchased the property for cleanup; the company informed living descendants in the area of the skeletal remains. ==Shell involvement==

Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia engaged in a tax competition for the plant. In 2012, Pennsylvania structured a deal requiring Shell to invest at least $1 billion in Pennsylvania and create at least 2,500 construction jobs in exchange for a 25-year tax incentive of $66 million per year and tied to production, reducing Shell's tax by up to 20 per cent. The combined incentive could reach $1.65 billion. Shell announced the Pennsylvania site on March 15, 2012. The deal was one of the largest tax incentives in Pennsylvania's history. Shell had selected the site due to the ongoing Marcellus natural gas trend and the site's prime location within the Marcellus Shale. Shell pledged with Beaver County officials on environmental cleanup regardless if it opened the proposed plant, and in a worst-case scenario prepare the area land for at least some sort of future industrial use if Shell decided not to build there. This included building a massive bridge over PA 18, commenced in 2015, to connect both sides of the property without requiring an intersection along the route, as well as a Shell-funded rerouting of PA 18 and infrastructure improvements to I-376. Shell also gave a donation to the Beaver County recycling center so the center could extend its operating hours. Shell estimated the project would create 6,000 construction jobs to build the site and 600 permanent jobs for employees working at the plant. == Construction ==

in August 2019. In 2015, Shell began preparing the site for future construction, moving 7.2 million cubic yards of dirt, building new bridges and a new rail line, and completing a total relocation of PA Route 18. Docking and bulkhead facilities to be used during construction were created by Alberici. As of 2019, over 5,000 employees were working on construction. On September 25, 2018 in a conference with the Wall Street Journal, Ben van Beurden, the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, said that the project was within budget and ahead of schedule. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection approved two permits for a -long pipeline to feed the cracker plant on December 20, 2018. Called the Falcon Ethane Pipeline, it connects ethane sources in Houston, Pennsylvania, Scio, Ohio, and Cadiz, Ohio to the plant. Construction on the pipeline began in March 2019. Regional economic impact The Penn-Beaver Hotel of Rochester, a building dating to the 1920s, once serving as a luxury hotel, was restored due to demand from plant construction. Parts of Northern Lights Shopping Center in Economy were demolished for redevelopment, more than likely due to the plant. However, as of January 2020, Economy Borough has not been informed of any future redevelopment plans at the site. In 2018 Mount Airy Casinos won the licensing to build a satellite casino just north of the cracker plant, although that plan was rejected by the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board in November 2019 The Southern Beltway, which had already confirmed would be extending its second leg in 2020 from U.S. Route 22 to Interstate 79, moved the project up a year solely as a result of the proposed plant. ==Project opposition==

In late 2015, a group of environmentalists submitted an appeal to Pennsylvania's Environmental Hearing Board to challenge the air quality permit that was granted for the proposed plant; the group argued that the state should have required stricter monitoring requirements for fugitive pollutant emissions from the plant. The state of Pennsylvania allowed the factory to release 2.2 million tons of carbon dioxide each year while Shell anticipated the plant's emissions would be below that level. == Operation ==

Operations started in November 2022, but the complex had to be shut down only a few months later due to a problem with a system that burns off unwanted gases. In October 2024, Shell announced that the complex would fail to meet its profitability target of $1 to $1.5 billion EBITDA that year. On June 4, 2025, the plant's #5 ethane furnace experienced a fire and explosion. The following month, Shell CEO Wael Swan announced that he was looking to sell the Monaca complex due to financial underperformance. == In popular culture ==

Morgantown, West Virginia country-folk musician Charles Wesley Godwin wrote his song "Cranes of Potter" about the hypothetical backstory of the woman whose buried bones were found during excavation for the complex, which he saw driving from West Virginia to his studio in Pennsylvania. ==References==