EXCITING TIMES FOR ETHANE
ABS-classed Ethane Crystal built for Reliance Industries
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here seems no end to the rippling effects of the unconventional oil and gas revolution, which, over the past decade, has boosted oil and gas production in the U.S. by nearly 60 percent. This hydrocarbon ocean reversed the declining energy fortunes of the United States, thwarted the geopolitical aims of some powerful leading gas producers, and reshaped the status quo in the energy sector. Over the past eight years, it has also changed the world of petrochemicals, and now has manufacturers around the globe scrambling to take advantage of what appears to be a virtually endless supply of low cost U.S. ethane. The most important industrial use of ethane is in the production of ethylene, the basic ingredient of the world’s most commonly created organic compound, polyethylene. This happens in a process called cracking (because the ethane molecules are broken, or ‘cracked’, to make the smaller ethylene molecules). Just 15 years ago, the price of U.S. ethane was so high that even domestic chemical giants were abandoning their American cracking plants and building all their new facilities elsewhere, to be closer to their ethane suppliers in, for example, the Middle East. The outlook was bleak as more than a dozen plants on the U.S. Gulf Coast were shut down in 2008 and 2009.
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Today, a superabundance of U.S. ethane has become the cornerstone of rebirth in the American chemical processing industry. A total of about USD$185 billion is being invested in more than 300 new U.S. petrochemical projects under construction or in planning, according to the American Chemistry Council. In 2016, in fact, expenditures on chemical plants alone accounted for half of all capital investment in U.S. manufacturing, up from less than 20 percent in 2009, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Ethane is chiefly found alongside methane in natural gas and in a byproduct of crude oil refining, associated natural gas, as part of a hydrocarbon mixture called natural gas liquids (NGL). Fractionating plants separate NGL into its components, mostly ethane, propane and butanes, which are basic raw materials, or feedstocks, used in industrial processes that produce everything from shopping bags to semiconductors. Led by shale gas, NGL production in the U.S. has nearly doubled since 2010, outpacing the rate of natural gas production growth and setting an annual production record of 3.7 million barrels per day (b/d) in 2017, according to the U.S. Energy Information
