Beaver County residents want to know what is going at Shell cracker plant
MONACA, Pa. (KDKA) — We're still working to learn more about the cause and effects of the most recent flaring episode at Beaver County's Shell cracker plant Tuesday night.
Videos and pictures show a large flame shooting out of the flaring stack, with a house spraying down a hot spot. It happened in the high-pressure ground flare, and now there's a panel on the stack that appears charred following an alleged malfunction.
KDKA-TV's Meghan Schiller reached out to Shell again Thursday to learn more and also sifted through more than 35 recent malfunction reports filed by Shell to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to see what's going wrong.
Shell's spokesperson, Curtis Thomas, said the ground flare was activated Tuesday night "in response to a compressor trip which resulted in noise that some of nearby residents heard." He also said "it is not uncommon for water to be used to assist in cooling external areas of ground-flares. We have identified some areas on one ground flare that will eventually be reinforced during a planned maintenance activity."
Thomas did not elaborate on what "reinforcement" entails or when that maintenance would take place.
KDKA-TV also reached out to the state DEP and learned it's tracking what happened this week in Beaver County, pointing out that the plant now has less than 30 days to file a full written report to the DEP with all of the details.
Since coming online in November, the plant filed 11 malfunction reports to the DEP.
In summary, KDKA-TV's Meghan Schiller found reports of odors, flaring, pumps tripping offline, equipment failures caused by extremely low temperatures and excess and elevated emissions.
Community members can read the specifics of those elevated emissions on the DEP's website. Shell measures them when things go awry and report to the state. During a malfunction this past February, the plant estimated emissions in excess of 16,000 tons of CO2, 9 tons of nitrogen oxides and more than 12 tons of VOCs or volatile organic compounds into the environment.
Residents can read the malfunction reports here.
