In 2014, when Jackie Shock-Stewart and her husband Matt Stewart moved to Beaver County, they were only vaguely aware of plans to build a petrochemical facility near the Ohio River. Two years later, Shell announced the construction of a new ethane cracker plant that would produce millions of tons of plastic on 386 acres about two miles from their home. The ethane would be sourced from natural gas from wells in the Marcellus and Utica shale formations.
“They did a really good and effective job of making it seem like a positive,” Ms. Stewart said of Shell. “It was very much marketed as a modern, clean industry.”
Pollution from the plant has been far more disruptive than most people expected. In May 2023, Shell was fined $10 million for air quality violations. Though it had only been operational for about six months, the plant had exceeded its 12-month emission limits for volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and hazardous air pollutants.
The same month, the Environmental Integrity Project and Clean Air Council filed a citizen suit against Shell over the Monaca plant to “redress and prevent repeated and ongoing violations of the Clean Air Act and the Pennsylvania Air Pollution Control Act.”
In February 2024, John Flynn, a Beaver resident, filed another lawsuit against Shell, seeking class-action status and alleging that Shell had “released substantial and unreasonable noxious odors, fugitive dust and light emissions” that “invaded” nearby properties and caused damages. The lawsuit defines its class of plaintiffs as anyone who lives within two miles of the facility.
“I think expectations from the beginning were extremely low,” said Anaïs Peterson, who works as a petrochemicals campaigner for Earthworks, a nonprofit focused on fenceline communities and the impacts of oil, gas and minerals development. “It was very clear what kind of facility this was going to be. We all knew it was going to be bad, but it’s shockingly bad.”
Before Shell even began operations, Ms. Shock-Stewart noticed sweet smells in the air outside her home in 2021, and she began to wonder about the impact the facility could have on her family. (The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection cited Shell for “malodorous air contaminants” in September 2021.)
The plant takes ethane, a liquid hydrocarbon separated from fracked natural gas, and heats it to extremely high temperatures, “cracking” the molecular bonds holding it together to form ethylene. It then processes the ethylene to make polyethylene pellets called nurdles. A plastics feedstock, the nurdles are then melted down to make everything from plastic bottles to car parts.
Ms. Shock-Stewart reviewed map projections of the plant’s effects on air quality and saw that her children’s elementary school was “smack dab in the middle of an area of concern.”
The Shell plant was expected to emit carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, PM2.5 fine particles, sulfur dioxide, VOCs and hazardous air pollutants. Both sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide are associated with respiratory health effects like shortness of breath, asthma and wheezing, and nitrogen oxide has been shown to have a “more serious” impact on children than on adults.
As she learned more, Ms. Shock-Stewart realized that she no longer felt comfortable living so close to the plant, and the couple decided to move to Ohio in 2022. “It was hard to imagine pulling up the roots that we had so carefully put down. We felt like we were really part of our community and had a lot of connections and a lot of friends,” she said.
With the plant now operational, some in Beaver County are asking if others will follow in the couple’s footsteps, leaving the area or choosing not to move to the county at all because of the plant. They are worried about the air and water quality violations that Shell has accumulated in the months since start-up and what they see as a lack of transparency from the company. And they wonder what the plant will mean for Beaver County’s long-term fortunes.
Like a freight train 24 hours a day
Nearly a decade ago, politicians and local officials hailed the Shell plant as a “once in a generation investment” that would create 6,000 temporary construction jobs, 600 permanent jobs and spur economic growth in a region that had yet to fully recover from the decline of the American steel industry. Then-governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat, said he was “elated” by the news and called the Shell project “a game changer.” The state granted Shell $1.65 billion in subsidies in 2012.
But Shell’s presence in southwestern Pennsylvania has been marred by years of violation notices, malfunctions and lawsuits. Since 2017, DEP has issued 27 notices of violation to the plant, mainly for air quality. Most of the violations were issued after the plant began operations in the fall of 2022; the most recent is from last month.
The facility cuts a striking contrast to the county’s quiet backdrop. “It’s like the eye of Sauron. It’s like hell opened up a portal above Beaver,” said Mark Dixon, an activist and filmmaker who lives in Pittsburgh and is leading a community air monitoring effort around the plant.
Down the river from the Shell plant are two other chemical plants, BASF and Styropek, and Shell replaced the Horsehead company’s zinc production facility when they bought the Monaca property in 2014. But the scale of Shell’s plant is “totally different,” Ms. Peterson said, and the effects it’s having on people and the environment are different, too.
The law firm handling the lawsuit filed by Mr. Flynn in February seeking class action status said it had heard from 75 others seeking to join the action. Some of those potential plaintiffs’ grievances are quoted in the complaint. Residents complained about the “strong chemical smell,” “annoying flashing lights all night long,” “very noisy” and “large fire flare-ups” that kept them from opening their windows and going outside in nice weather.
“I cannot sit on my patio without the smell or noise from this plant,” Mr. Flynn said in the complaint. “Sounds like a freight train 24 hours a day.”
In an emailed response to Inside Climate News, Lauren Camarda, the DEP’s regional communications manager, said that most of Shell’s rolling 12-month emissions have decreased since the 2023 settlement agreement, including hazardous air pollutants, VOCs and carbon monoxide, which “are now below Shell’s 12-month rolling emission limit in its air quality plan approval.”
She said Shell has installed new equipment and made other improvements to reduce their emissions.
In a statement provided to Inside Climate News, Shell spokesperson Curtis Thomas said the company “remains committed to the health and well-being of its employees and the surrounding community.”
“We are also committed to complying with all county, state and federal regulations. And when there is an issue, we work to fix it,” he wrote. “We will continue to report out and comply with all regulations while also applying lessons learned and best practices to ensure our operations have the least amount of negative impact on people, and/or the environment.”
The entire sky was lit up
Residents and advocates say that Shell and DEP are not communicating with the public quickly enough about issues at the plant, and there is no real-time source of information about the facility for them to check when they suspect something might be wrong.
Shell maintains a fenceline monitoring page on its website, where it publishes the results of air sampling conducted at the plant. However, there is a lag between when the data is collected and when it is released online.
Ms. Camarda said DEP understands the fenceline monitoring data is “not posted in real time because monitoring data goes through verification before it is posted, but DEP will continue to advocate for regular, timely, accurate updates.”
“DEP’s community information webpage provides more information on the Shell facility than for any other facility in the Commonwealth,” she said. “DEP oversees and works to update this page in a timely manner to include inspections conducted by DEP and reports submitted by Shell.”
Still, advocates and residents said DEP’s Shell web page is not updated fast enough to be truly useful.
The experiences of Andie Grey, who lives about three miles from the plant, illustrate what can happen when residents do not have access to real-time updates. In September 2022, Ms. Grey went outside on her elevated patio and looked toward the Shell facility.
“The entire sky was lit up, and I thought it was a fire,” she said. She was unsure what to do next and worried about her elderly neighbors, who might need help evacuating.
Unable to find news on Shell’s Facebook page, she and her husband drove to the plant looking for answers. When they got there, they realized that this was not an out-of-control fire but an instance of flaring, the deliberate burning of excess gases. “We didn’t get a notice,” she said. “There was nothing.”
Mark Dixon, the filmmaker and activist, has set up 25 air monitors around the plant and hopes eventually to analyze the differences in air quality before Shell began operations and after they start full operations. The air quality is usually slightly worse in Pittsburgh than in Beaver, he said, but not in April 2023. “On this occasion, the air was significantly worse and accumulating right in the heart of Beaver,” he said. “It’s anomalous. Right away, I’m like, wait, why would Beaver be notably worse?”
The next day, April 12, Shell posted a short message on its Facebook page about the smells. “There has been an odor detected originating from our wastewater treatment plant. Depending on wind direction, the odor was detected in certain areas offsite as well,” the company wrote. “We are working to resolve this matter as quickly as possible. We have notified the appropriate regulatory agencies and apologize for any inconvenience this issue may cause.” The post did not mention that the cause of the smells could be benzene.
“That day we happened to be out on the water,” said Evan Clark, waterkeeper at the Three Rivers Waterkeeper, who has been carrying out testing and monitoring of the watershed around the plant in partnership with the Mountain Watershed Association. “I saw at least a half dozen people out fishing on the water boating around the plant with no idea that there was a leak that was dangerous enough that they had sent a lot of their employees home,” he said.
On April 25, a toxicologist consulting for Shell spoke at a virtual meeting held by the company and said the benzene and VOCs detected by Shell’s monitors were not above exposure limits for workers. Shell’s general manager apologized for the incident and said the company could do a better job communicating with the public, according to reporting by PA Environment Digest.
In May, Shell filed a malfunction report about the malodors from its wastewater treatment plant, which it said began on April 11 and ended on April 20. The emissions associated with the malfunction included VOCs, hazardous air pollutants, benzene, toluene and naphthalene. The report said that the malfunction “did not pose danger to the public health and safety or the environment” and said the release had not caused water quality issues in the river.
Residents cite the lack of communication from the government and the company when they talk about their fears about an emergency at Shell. Many are still unsettled by the 2023 chemical accident just over the state border in East Palestine, Ohio, which affected Beaver County.
“My biggest concern is that something like that is going to happen, and they’re not going to notify the community,” Ms. Grey said. “They’re not going to tell us that we need to leave when we should, and people will be harmed.”
This story is published in partnership with Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment.
First Published: May 9, 2024, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: May 10, 2024, 5:47 p.m.
