Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.
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Braskem America has a petrochemical plant in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania where workers have been literally living to make polypropylene for N-95 masks.
One of our alert readers sent me the most wonderful article this morning. It was from the Washington Post, of all places, hardly a place to find politically incorrect news, but there it was with a lengthy headline of “They lived in a factory for 28 days to make millions of pounds of raw PPE materials to help fight coronavirus.” The term “PPE materials,” though, reveals the reluctance of the Post editors to tell readers what those materials were; namely petrochemicals derived from oil and gas products delivered by pipelines of all things.
The story is a beautiful one and here are a few excerpts:
For 28 days, they did not leave — sleeping and working all in one place.
In what they called a “live-in” at the factory, the undertaking was just one example of the endless ways that Americans in every industry have uniquely contributed to fighting coronavirus. The 43 men went home Sunday after each working 12-hour shifts all day and night for a month straight, producing tens of millions of pounds of the raw materials that will end up in face masks and surgical gowns worn on the front lines of the pandemic.
No one told them they had to do it, Braskem America CEO Mark Nikolich said. All of the workers volunteered, hunkering down at the plant to ensure no one caught the virus outside as they sought to meet the rocketing demand for their key product, polypropylene, which is needed to make various medical and hygienic items. Braskem’s plant in Neal, W.Va., is doing a second live-in now. The story was earlier reported in Philadelphia’s WPVI...
For countless face masks in America, their journey from a blob of chemicals into the hands of first responders and grocery-store clerks likely began at a plant just like Braskem’s. The company, which touts itself as the largest petrochemical producer in the Americas, is one of the earliest links in the supply chain, providing a key ingredient for the personal protective equipment that millions of people worldwide now need each day.
Nikolich said the company has shifted its production lines to focus on making that key ingredient, polypropylene, given the high demand due to covid-19. The company then sells the product to clients that turn it into a nonwoven fabric, which medical manufacturers ultimately use to make face masks, medical gowns and even disinfectant wipes, among other items.
Nikolich estimated that the Braskem plants in Pennsylvania and West Virginia have produced 40 million pounds of polypropylene over the past month — enough to hypothetically make either 500 million N95 masks or 1.5 billion surgical masks, if the material were used only for that purpose. (It will also be used for other PPE such as the gowns, Nikolich stressed.)
If you only scan the headlines or don’t pay close attention, you might think these workers were making N95 masks or other PPE but, of course, they’re not. They’re producing a petrochemical, polypropylene, that is essential to those masks and PPE. As my reader notes, “polypropylene made from ethane is much cheaper to produce than from naphtha/crude oil” but “first, we need cracker plants to convert the ethane to ethylene.” Not only that, but we need pipelines that deliver the raw materials to the cracker plant and ethane and natural gas liquids to petrochemical plants.
Guess who is opposed to those cracker plants, people such as the clown Mayor of Pittsburgh, Bill Peduto. Here’s a bit of his recent message to his constituents, which he begins by acknowledging the importance of both PPE and trucking and ends with a ridiculous call “for clean energy” having nothing to do with anything and that would do nothing for either:
We’ve done our best to keep them safe while performing their critically-needed work, going above CDC standards by providing masks and PPE to our front-line workers, thoroughly cleaning their facilities, and allowing other City employees to work from home. Their services to you will continue through this pandemic and beyond. The City of Pittsburgh does not close.
Our work couldn’t be done without the support of private employees throughout the Pittsburgh area. That includes people working in warehouses, trucking, grocery and convenience stores, those cleaning buildings and hospitals, nurses, doctors, hospital workers, bus drivers, pharmacists, restaurant workers and so many more. Many of these workers are in turn protected by our great union partners and I want to thank them too…
We need to double-down on commitments on clean energy and zero waste, building a new and resilient future.
Then, of course, there are all those Mariner East demagogues (Absent Andy Dinniman, the Chester County DA, et al) and the grandest dame of all, the Queen of Obstruction, THE Delaware PovertyKeeper a/k/a Riverkeeper. There is, too, the Clean Air Council that never met a pipeline it didn’t oppose. And, they all exist due to enablers from the Heinz Endowments and the William Penn Foundation who have funded the attacks on oil, gas, petrochemicals, pipelines and anything else that offends their gentry class sensibilities as they party on, fly expensive planes and dance the night away in the comfort of needing neither a mask nor a job.
All of these folks, from the elitist enablers to every last one of their sycophant shills is adamantly opposed to developing the ingredients to produce life saving medical PPE. Not a one of them has every done one damn thing even remotely close to what these Braskem America heroes making polypropylene have accomplished. All they’ve ever done is spend someone else’s else money. Moreover, a good part of that money has been spent pursuing largely destructive special interests intended to burnish their politically correct green credentials. They’re fakes, phonies and frauds. The folks getting it done are the roughnecks, the truckers, the pipeliners, the workers in petrochemical plants and the health care folks they serve.
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