Flooding the planet with plastics from US Fracking Glut: Big Oil’s answer to Climate Emergency
Neighbors of the new Gulf Coast Growth Ventures facility near Corpus Christi say ExxonMobil and SABIC have left them in the dark while courting local regulators.
By Julie DermanskyonJan 27, 2022 @ 06:00 PST
The same day ExxonMobil announced its ambition to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, word spread that its mammoth plastics manufacturing complex near Corpus Christi, Texas, had begun production.
The facility, known as an ethane steam cracker, will feed the production of nurdles – tiny pellets that serve as raw materials for plastic products. The plant’s state air permit allows it to send more than 3.5 million tons per year of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
To Hell with the Planet. U.S. frack glut Plan is booming cheap Plastics
“We are up and operating. We have been for a while,” Paul B. Fritsch, site manager for ExxonMobil’s joint venture with Saudi Basic Industries Corp, (SABIC), told the governing body of the Port of Corpus Christi at its Jan. 18 meeting.
see also> BBC – Newsday, Chemical pollution passes …safe limit for humanity – study. Human-produced chemicals are now at a level that will impact humans says study. New research shows that the cocktail of 350,000 chemicals that mankind now manufactures for use around the world has exceeded boundaries of what is safe for the stability of the Earth’s ecosystem. The toxicity and damage caused by many of these chemicals is understood, but the long-term effects of thousands of them is still unknown. …
The irony of promising net-zero emissions while firing up a greenhouse-gas polluter was not lost on some critics.
“Pledging to make your operations ‘net zero’ when your entire raison d’etre is to continue producing the fossil fuels destroying the livable world: this is like pledging to become more energy-efficient when your business is manufacturing electric chairs,” Genevieve Guenther, an author and activist who specializes in fossil-fuel industry disinformation, wrote on Twitter the day of ExxonMobil’s announcement.
The ExxonMobil-SABIC partnership, known as Gulf Coast Growth Ventures (GCGV), began construction of the plant in once-rural San Patricio County, on Texas’ Coastal Bend, in 2019.
View of Corpus Christi from the Nueces Bay Causeway. Credit: Julie Dermansky
The GCGV facility is in addition to 31 new petrochemical projects along the Texas and Louisiana coasts that collectively will generate 50 million tons of greenhouse-gas pollution — the equivalent of 11 new coal-fired power plants, according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization.
Continue reading “While Exxon Touts Net-Zero Lies, its Huge Plastics Complex Goes Online in Texas”
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