Ohio’s oil is a boon for plastics production

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from just outside historic harbor village just across the river from Marietta, Ohio, and that is the Ohio River behind me. Today we’re going to be talking about something that is an exception from the exception. So the big exception is the American shale sector because it has a different economic structure and uses different technologies for most oil production in the rest of the world. And as a result has very low production costs, and produces a lot of natural gas as a byproduct of oil production. So when you’re in Texas, most notably, say the Permian, people are after the crude oil, and then natural gas comes up as a byproduct. And they have to flare that natural gas until the infrastructure can be built out to absorb it and bring it into the say, the chemical sector here in Ohio and moving into Pittsburgh area in Pennsylvania, you’ve got a different problem. The natural gas field is the Marcellus Utica, and they are dry gas fields where people are after the natural gas rather than the liquids, because they’re using it for fuel in every place from Chicago to Boston, to Washington, DC. And so they need it for electricity. But there are still liquids here, especially in the western parts of the play, which move into say, Ohio. There you’re getting a fair percentage of something called natural gas liquids, which in layman’s terms means things like propane and butane. That means that in this part of the country, it’s not just that the natural gas is cheap, because the production costs in the Marcellus are very low. But so many NGLS come out of places like the Utica play that Ohio has become a world leader in things like high end plastics, because for them, it’s not the oil, that’s the waste product. It’s the propane and such that is a primary feedstock into chemical specifically for things like plastics. And so we’re seeing dozens of chemical facilities that do secondary processing, popping up in the more populated parts of Ohio, taking advantage of what is basically below global cost inputs of things like ethane, propane, butane, and the rest. So here we are in the middle of the continent, and we’re suddenly seen an explosion in industrial activity for something that we normally associate with the Chinese coast, the Persian Gulf or the Texas coast. Very different situation, very different geology, very different outcomes.