Facility

The downturn in oil and natural gas prices that has prompted the industry to cut back in the field continues to weigh on the Appalachian Basin’s supply chain as a new wave of layoffs and plant closures is set to take effect in the coming months.

Work to clear part of a site in Belmont County, OH, for PTT Global Chemical pcl’s (PTTGC) proposed ethane cracker has already started and is expected to be complete by the fall.

State and local officials gathered Thursday for the groundbreaking of Moxie Energy LLC and Caithness Energy LLC’s 1 GW natural gas-fired power plant in Northeast Pennsylvania.

FERC on Thursday authorized the construction of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export and related facilities proposed by Energy Transfer’s Lake Charles LNG Co. and Trunkline Gas Co. in Louisiana.

A Pennsylvania-based energy transportation and logistics firm is expanding in West Virginia to meet shale field demand for pipeline inspections with a facility that’s expected to open in January at a shuttered steel plant in Benwood, WV, about three miles south of Wheeling in Marshall County.

INEOS Technologies has licensed its Innovene S Process, a slurry technology for the production of medium- and high-density polyethylene, to a subsidiary of PTT Global Chemical pcl (PTTGC), which is planning to build an ethane cracker in Ohio’s Belmont County.

Calgary, Alberta-based Veresen Inc. plans to develop a $140 million ethane storage facility in Saskatchewan, and it said it has a 20-year contract with NOVA Chemicals Corp. to take the majority of the capacity. The facility on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border is close to the Empress, Alberta natural gas liquids processing facility and is expected to attract growing supplies of ethane from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. The salt cavern facility will have a capacity of 1 million bbl of ethane and will be connected via pipeline to Veresen’s ethane gathering system in southeast Alberta. Assuming it gets timely regulatory approvals, the new storage facility is expected to be in service in the second half of 2018.

Dallas-based private equity firm Panda Power Funds LP has secured $835 million in private financing to begin work on one of the nation’s largest coal-to-natural gas power conversion projects in central Pennsylvania.

The planned restart on Monday of a damaged Transcontinental Gas Pipeline Co. (Transco) natural gas compression station in Gibson, LA, is being delayed following an explosion and fire that killed three people and injured two others seriously Thursday morning.