Pennsylvania Chemicals Community Meeting

 

Title: Pennsylvania Chemicals Virtual Community Meeting

Duration: 58 minutes 40 seconds

Description: Virtual community meeting discussing the Pennsylvania Chemicals project. Presentation from various staff followed by a Q and A session.

Accessibility script Pennsylvania Chemicals Virtual Community Meeting

[Visual]

An aerial view of the Pennsylvania Chemicals plant.

[Text displayed]

Welcome!

Shell Pennsylvania Chemicals

May 6, 2021

Virtual Community Meeting

[Video footage]

Shannon Debes is visible via webcam in the top right hand corner of the screen throughout her presentation

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

Good evening everyone. I am Shannon Debes, the community liaison officer for the Shell Pennsylvania Chemicals project and we want to welcome you tonight to our first virtual community meeting. I have been serving in the role since 2012 and I am an area native and really glad to welcome you to our forum this evening.

[Visual]

An aerial view of the Pennsylvania Chemicals plant.

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Introduction and Safety Briefing

Shannon Debes

Community Liaison Officer,

Pennsylvania Chemicals/Shell Polymers

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

So this evening you’ll be hearing from several team members about our upcoming commissioning and start up activities and what's been taking place on site in recent months to bring us to this point so I’m happy to introduce you to them in just a moment but first let's review together our safety briefing

[Visual]

A Safety First presentation slide which Shannon talks through

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

So this is how we begin every meeting in Shell to support our safety and to be mindful of our surroundings, so noting that most of us are at home our presenters included. Lets just take a moment to go through this and I know we have some folks on the phone joining us this evening as well and welcome. So first we ask that you please not take this call while driving even when using a headset or a handsfree phone, still somewhat of a distraction and when using a headset we want to be sure that you’re able to hear the fire alarm if it happens to go off in your home or around you. Also we ask that you please be aware of the location of the nearest fire alarm, fire extinguisher, any emergency exits, some muster points if you have those for your family and also the location of your first aid kit. Also we ask for this evening if you’re able to keep your microphones on mute that would be helpful and to please feel free to submit any questions by typing a question in the chat box and we’ll talk about that in just a moment.

[Visual]

A presentation slide detailing the Agenda which highlights who will be talking in the meeting and the order of the topics. Shannon talks through this slide

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

For the rest of this evening our project director Chris Howell will begin by providing an overview of our site and our building progress to date. And he’ll be joined by our production unit manager Scott Thompson. And Scott will be sharing information that is specific to some commissioning and start up activities that we’re going to have taking place in the next few weeks. Scott will be followed by our Health Safety and Security and Environment manager Steve Norton. And Steve’s going to be providing some insight into our safety practices and protocol. Then we’ll hear from our environmental manager Kim Kaal who will be sharing some details on our permining and monitoring practices and finally our general manager Bill Watson will introduce you to people, our people, our culture and some of the buildings that we have already begun to commission to support our eventual operation. So throughout the evening those of you who are joining us online will have the opportunity to share questions in the box in the corner of your screen and following the presentations we’ll have time for a few questions and others will be answered on our website in the near future. We’ll also be in the summary section sharing our contact information so whether you’d prefer to reach out to us by email by phone by web or social media we’ll share all of that at the end so that you have that available to you. And with that I’m happy to turn it over to Chris Howell. Chris?

[Video footage]

Chris Howell is visible via webcam in the top right hand corner of the screen throughout his presentation

[Visual]

An aerial mockup of the Pennsylvania Chemicals plant.

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Project Overview

Commissioning and Start-Up

Chris Howell

Project Director, Pennsylvania Chemicals, Engineering and Projects

Scott Thompson

Production Unit Manager, ECU (Ethane Cracking Unit)

[Voice of Chris Howell]

Hi. Good evening everybody I’m Chris Howell. I'm the project director for Pennsylvania Chemicals. I have roots in Pennsylvania. My father was born and raised in Erie and I grew up in Minnesota. I’ve been with Shell for 29 years now and moved to the area with my family about 3 years ago and just really excited to be on the project you know if you’re a builder like I am having worked for Shell for a number of years it doesn’t get any bigger or more exciting than this and really proud of what we;ve accomplished so far and really welcome the opportunity to share that with you tonight. If we look at where we are today we’ll go to the next slide and I’ll show you a layout of the overall facility. Shannon next slide.

[Visual]

An aerial site map of the Pennsylvania Chemicals plant.

[Voice of Chris Howell]

There we go so if we look at the overall layout it looks like a very large site and actually it’s very crowded and so it does present some challenges as your building construction so we’ll talk about that a bit here today but really the heart of the unit is in the middle of the facility which is the Ethane Cracking unit and to the right of this on the photo you'll see the Polyethylene Unit. So the North side of the facility is bordered by the Ohio River and then the south side we have the highway next to it. If you look along the Ohio River you’ll see our water treatment plant and our utilities to the North and then you’ll see our power generation plant in the middle of the overall facility. You’ll see where we have the railway tracks that will go in on the East side of the highway and then you’ll see where those railway tracks come through the facility. Then on the south side you’ll see the administration buildings that we have and Bill Watson will talk more to you about that as we go through the presentation tonight. We’ve been able to capture three modes of transportation to support the site during construction we’ve brought in equipment and materials through the Ohio River, it’s an active rail system so we’re actually able to bring in materials through that and then we’ve been able to use the road to bring in the remaining equipment. So we’ve used all three modes, during operations we will only use the rail system as the primary means to move product off site. We’re also able to truck on the lower bottom of the right side, you’ll see the truck silos and that’s something that’s very visible from the road when you drive by. In addition to the facility we also have laydown areas in Aliquippa so that’s where we stage many of the materials that we have and then we could bring those materials in through the various means that we have. Those sites are starting to close now and we’ve really consolidated down to our main warehouse and one laydown area at this point in time. We had some sixty thousand stools over there at one moment in time and we’re down to six hundred and this stage.

[Visual]

Three photographs are shown and one slide with text. The photos are of the plant at it’s different stages. The fourth image shows text and various company logos

[Text displayed]

Code of Excellence

We believe. We are committed. We are one.

Accountability

Respect

Construction -80%

Craft -8000

[Voice of Chris Howell]

So if we go to the next photo I’ll talk a bit about where we are today on the project and so what you see on the right hand side is a bit of a montage of where we were. Back in December of 2017 this is what the site looked like when we’d just graded the civil earth works here on site and put in the tents that the construction workforce would use. And you see what the facility looks like today so you see the very tall structures on the right which are associated with Polyethylene units, we have three trains there and two trains on the right hand side and one on the middle and then on the left hand side you’ll see the Ethylene cracking unit where we have the seven furnaces that are involved with that project. On the left hand side you’ll see the MOAC one of the most frequent questions about the site is the cranes, whether it’s the number or the size of the cranes. We have had a very large crane on site which we call the Mother of all Cranes. Which is the PTC200 that’s the second largest land crane in the US and really worldwide it’s one of the largest cranes. We’ve used that crane extensively here for a number of months. That crane has been demobilised and we’ve really started to ramp down the number of cranes from the large side and we’ve moved into much smaller cranes as we get into the finishing works. It looks like the site is largely finished but we still have a lot of work to do we’re putting in the pipe work that needs to connect the various packages we’re pulling cables and putting in instruments. So that’s really the work that’s going on so if you imagine the shell of the house is built and a lot of the equipment is put in place but now we need to connect everything together. Overall we’re about 80% complete at this stage. Really we talk about the equipment and show you fancy pictures but at the end of the day it’s really about the people that deliver these projects. We have some eight thousand craft on site today and we really have partnered I think very well with the local union trades and our main works contractor Bechtel too. To build that partnership that it takes to actually deliver a project like this. It takes all of us working together to really make this happen. We’ve developed what we call the code of excellence to talk about how we all work together to make the project a success and that really starts with respect. That’s respect for each other, that’s respect for the community and that's really leaving a legacy in the region that we can all be proud of for years to come. So that’s our big focus with the workforce. The workforce is primarily from the local area where we can get resources and then we have travellers that come in from all across the United States that can also help. Just the scale that we have it really taps out what we can derive locally and so it takes everyone to bring this together and we have found really strong support from the project and it really is a national scale project at this point in time. So with that I’d like to hand over to Scott Thompson who will start to talk a bit around what we’re doing with the equipment that we have and when we start to move into the operation phase.

[Video footage]

Scott Thompson is visible via webcam in the top right hand corner of the screen throughout his presentation

[Visual]

Three photographs are shown that Scott will detail

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Start up of raw water plant during winter

[Voice of Scott Thompson]

Thanks Chris. Good evening everyone my name is Scott Thompson and I’m the production unit manager for the ethane cracking unit. I'm a chemical engineer originally from Illinois but have been living in Beaver County for the past 3-years and loving it. I'm thrilled to be a part of this project and this community. One thing I’d like to quickly mention is that this meeting is being recorded and will be available on our website for future viewing. As Chris mentioned this is a very exciting time for this project as we begin commissioning activities over the past several months, our utilities production team working in close collaboration with Bechtel has made tremendous progress I’d like to highlight some of the progress for you tonight and then also talk about an activity that we're about to start in the coming weeks. One of the first systems that our team needed to bring online was the raw water treatment plant this plant clarifies and filters water from the Ohio River for use at our plant.On the bottom right hand side of the screen you can see drone footage of this section of the plant and above it is an aerial view of one of our clarifiers. With the ambient temperatures below freezing you’ll notice that a significant amount of ice floats on top of the clarifier similar to which you would see in the arctic. What you can’t see, below the ice is the removal of the solids from the river water which is what that equipment is designed to do. On the left side of the screen two of our production operators are performing the start of procedure for this system using iPads. The iPads allow our team members to have access to a tremendous amount of information while in the field whether it’s procedures, drawings or even access to 3D models of the plants. The use of innovation and technology has and will continue to be a key enabler to our success. I have a video that we created to capture this raw water commissioning and startup milestone and I'd like to share it with you now.

[Music]

Slow building Shell music plays throughout

[Video footage]

Video footage of natural ripples in water

[Text displayed]

Starting Up Raw Water Treatment

Pennsylvania Chemicals Project

[Visual]

Pennsylvania Chemicals view from above

[Video footage]

Heather Michaux is talking to camera

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Heather Michaux

UGF Deputy CSU & Maintenance Lead

[Voice of Heather Michaux]

It was January 31st the day we actually started it up. Snow, polar vortex the whole nine yards.

[Video footage]

Montage of close up shots of the water treatment machine outside in the snow. Then Scott Thompson is talking to the camera.

[Text displayed]

Scott Thompson

Production Unit Manager, UGF

[Voice of Scott Thompson]

The temperatures outside are below freezing, and therefore starting up a water plant in these conditions can be extremely difficult.

[Video footage]

Aerial view of the water plant. Footage of Huberto Diaz talking to the camera

[Text displayed]

Huberto Diaz

CSU Lead, UGF

[Voice of Huberto Diaz]

Everything was ready and ready to go. You get those butterflies in your stomach.

[Video footage]

Heather Michaux is talking to camera

[Voice of Heather Michaux]

Okay this is the moment of truth right.

[Video footage]

Footage of Shell employees looking at various screens of data for the water plant

[Voice of an employee]

I’m ready.

[Voice of another employee]

Yeah roger that 5-9-3-0-1 Charlie here comes your start.

[Video footage]

Video montage of the water plant starting up

[Voice of Heather Michaux]

Hearing the pump start up and then once it stayed on suction and actually ran all of this work that we put in, all of this effort over literally years and years that has gone into actually getting to start up real plant equipment, it was an exciting feeling.

[Video footage]

Close up footage of Shell employee in mask

[Video footage]

Chad DiStanislao is talking to camera

[Text displayed]

Chad DiStanislao

UGF Operator

[Voice of Chad DiStanislao]

It’s been a long road there’s been a ton of work to come into this

[Video footage]

John Platt is talking to camera

[Text displayed]

John Platt

Bechtel Senior Project Manager

[Voice of John Platt]

Today marks an inflection point for the project as we in earnest pivot to starting operations

[Video footage]

Montage of Shell employees in masks working at the site. Joe Lollini is talking to the camera

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Joe Lollini

UGF Operations Support Engineer

[Voice of Joe Lollini]

This milestone is going to set off a chain reaction sequence of events where eventually we will give all the utilities up and running. We’ll get CoGen up and running we’ll produce electricity for the first time and eventually we’ll start the ECU and the polyethylene unit and it will culminate in that very first pellet.

[Video footage]

Slow tracking aerial shot of the plant. Huberto Diaz is talking to the camera

[Voice of Huberto Diaz]

Over the last decade this project came to life whether you were wearing this red uniform or you were wearing a craft uniform in the field, everyone was all marching walking in the same direction to make this a success.

[Video footage]

Various shots of the site in the winter

[Visual]

Shell pecten

[Music]

Sound of Shell

[Visual]

Split screen images of the water system

[Text displayed]

Our clarifier at work

[Voice of Scott Thompson]

I hope the video gives you a sense of the excitement that our team members had and continue to have as we enter the phase of commissioning and startup. I was in the control room when that raw water intake pump was started for the very first time and it was incredible. We hired our first operators over two-and-a-half years ago, the vast majority from the local tri-state area and a few from the first process technology graduating class at the Community College of Beaver County. After all of the extensive training and preparation the time has come for us to safely and operate this society. The picture you’re seeing now is from the top of our clarifier with the Ohio River in the background. It was taken after the temperature increased so now you can better visualise the effects of the clarification process and the removal of solids from the raw water before it is used at our plant for a variety of systems. One of those is our steam system to generate steam for the very first time. I’d like to take the next couple minutes to talk about an activity called steam blowing which you may notice as you drive by the facility.

[Visual]

Split screen images of the steam blower system

[Text displayed]

Steam Blows

[Voice of Scott Thompson]

I'll talk about what it is, why it’s happening and what it’s going to look like, sound like and what it won’t smell like since there's no odour associated with it. When our plant is operational we primarily use steam at the site to power the turbines that either produce electricity or drive compressors. The steam feeding those turbines must be clean to keep the turbines operating reliably. Shell along with the rest of the industry uses a process called Steam blowing to ensure our steam pipes are extremely clean after construction is completed. In order to accomplish this we produce steam in our steam generators and then route it through our pipes at high rates to clean them. What you’ll be seeing is steam also known as water vapour, much is the same way when you place a tea kettle on the stove it makes a sound as the steam exits the spout, ours will also make a sound when it exits the pipes. The high flow rates of steam that we need to make the blows effective can create loud noises when the steam exits the system. So we bring in temporary silencers to reduce the velocity of the steam before it exits, which then reduces the sound that will generate. Noise studies have been conducted and the exit locations and use of silencers are factored into the overall design to ensure that we keep the noise levels below the township compliance. As a reference these levels are approximately equivalent to the noise one would hear from a hair dryer or vacuum cleaner also as I previously mentioned there is no odour from the steam blows just as there is no odour from the steam coming from a teapot. On this slide you can see the temporary equipment installed for steam blows and other projects and those large cylinders are the silencers that are used to reduce the noise. Steam blows will start once we start commissioning our gas turbines and generating steam this could begin as early as end of May. The frequency and duration of the steam blows will vary over the next several months, so this will continue until all the steam lines are blown. Each of these blows will vary in duration from shorter blows 4 to 6 hours to longer blows 24 to 36 hours. So in summary you may see or hear plumes of steam coming from inside our plant as you drive by the facility the next several months. It is not smoke nor an indication of anything abnormal happening inside of our facility, it is a controlled and safe commissioning activity that will bring us one step closer to full operations. As always if you have any questions please reach out to us and our contact information. We rely on your feedback as much as you rely on us to be a good neighbour. I’d now like to introduce you to Steve Norton who’ll share updates on our safety updates and protocols and practices.

[Video footage]

Steve Norton is visible via webcam in the top right hand corner of the screen throughout his presentation

[Visual]

Image of a diver working on a pipe below surface level

[Text displayed]

Safety Protocol and Practices

Steve Norton

HSSE (Health, Safety, Security and Environment) Manager

Pennsylvania Chemicals/Shell Polymers

[Voice of Steve Norton]

Thank you Scott. Good evening everyone. I'm Steve Norton and I’m the Shell Health and Safety Security and Environment manager. I'm originally from the UK and I've worked for Shell for the last 32 years and I'm delighted to have the opportunity to live and work in this beautiful part of Western Pennsylvania.

[Visual]

Slide regarding safety is shown that Steve will talk through

[Text displayed]

Managing Safety performance and preventing spread of virus

[Voice of Steve Norton]

Safety and care for people is a core value for Shell and for the Pennsylvania Chemicals Project. Our ambition is for everyone to go home safe, the slideshows the safety leadership activities that we are undertaking to achieve our goal. The activities are mainly related to human performance and behaviours and are done in partnership with Bechtel and the union leadership and as Chris mentioned we’ve implemented a code of excellence on the project it is a platform on which all our work is executed and is adapted from the building trades code of excellence. It comes down to Shell as the client, the contractors led by Bechtel and the workforce working together supporting each other and respecting each other. Doing our best every day to have a safe job and everyone go home safe. The collaboration in the code of excellence has really helped us to manage the COVID pandemic, the pictures on this slide show how we've adapted to the new ways of working. For example physical distancing and mask wearing we prepared a short video that shows how the team has worked together to put in place the COVID controls for the project. Shannon please can we play the video?

[Music]

Slow building Shell music plays throughout

[Video footage]

Slow tracking shot of the Shell Pennsylvania Chemical Plant

[Text displayed]

Caring through COVID

Pennsylvania Chemicals Project

Monaca, Pa

[Video footage]

John Platt is talking to camera

[Text displayed]

John Platt

Senior Project Manager, Bechtel

[Voice of John Platt]

What’s been really important to us is this being a place where people want to come to work and people know that they’re cared for.

[Video footage]

Video montage of Shell employees arriving on site following COVID protocols. Matt Mansell talking to the camera

[Text displayed]

Matt Mansell

Indirects Manager

Great Arrow Builders (GAB)

[Voice of Matt Mansell]

When sitting down one goal was to ensure that the minute that you arrived on the project, you felt safe, you work safe and everything around you was done correctly.

[Video footage]

Video montage of people wearing PPE and having COVID-19 testing. Hilary Mercer is talking to camera

[Text displayed]

Hilary Mercer

Vice President

Shell Polymers/Pennsylvania Chemicals

 

[Voice of Hilary Mercer]

We had to ensure that we could allow people to work in a way that would make sure that transmission did not occur on the site, but also looking after the local community.

[Video footage]

Aerial shot of the Chemicals plant followed by aerial shots of Monaca in Pennsylvania. A montage then follows of testing for COVID-19 at the site

[Voice of John Platt]

Recently on the project we've increased our capability to respond and be ready for whatever comes next, and one of those is increasing our testing capacity and increasing the programs we have -

[Video footage]

John Platt talking to camera

[Voice of John Platt]

- so that more people can get tested and we can get results faster.

[Video footage]

Various shots of COVID-19 testing

[Video footage]

Diana Hote talking to the camera

[Text displayed]
Diana Hote

COVID-19 Case Manager, great Arrow Builders

[Voice of Diana Hote]

At the beginning of December we rolled out this rapid antigen test. It's a Sofia Quidel test, which allows us to provide employees with a COVID-19 test result within 15 minutes.

[Video footage]

Various shots of COVID-19 testing

[Voice of Chris Howell]

So we are fully committed to making sure that we are taking every step to control the spread around our site with the contact tracing. By identifying and isolating where there are positive cases we then can mitigate the spread to others.

[Video footage]

Video montage of the Chemical Plant and the community during the pandemic

[Voice of Chris Howell]

When you see what’s happening outside of here in the local community and the broader scale in the US, it’s something that’s definitely impacting people's lives. Making sure that we’re protecting our people each and every day is a core value and fundamental to what we’re trying to do. 

[Video footage]

Chris Jackson is talking to camera

[Text displayed]

Chris Jackson

Production Unit Manager, Shell

[Voice of Chris Jackson]

We spend a lot of time talking about our care for people and following the rules and following the requirements. I think that it’s worth it when I can go home every day and know that I didn’t do anything to jeopardize the health of everyone.

[Video footage]

Video montage of the Chemical Plant taking COVID-19 precautions. Larry Nelson is talking to the camera

[Text displayed]

Larry Nelson

President, Beaver County Building Traders

[Voice of Larry Nelson]

We keep stressing the importance of self discipline on the workers. It’s at the forefront of everybody’s discussion here.

[Video footage]

Video montage of the Chemical Plant taking COVID-19 precautions. Lance Crawley talking to camera

[Text displayed]

Lance Crawley

Union Steward, Local 432

[Voice of Lance Crawley]

Everybody understands that there are rules and those rules are in places for a reasons, that is to keep everyone safe and healthy.

[Video footage]

Video montage of the Chemical Plant taking COVID-19 precautions. Hilary Mercer talking to camera

[Voice of Hilary Mercer]

I’m just incredibly proud of the team and everybody associated with this project.

[Visual]

Shell pecten

[Music]

Sound of Shell

[Visual]

Slide that Steve Norton will talk through

[Text displayed]

COVID-19 and Construction/Commissioning

[Voice of Steve Norton]

Our objective with the COVID controls is to protect the workforce, their families, and the local community. Whilst we progressed the project and preserved jobs. Last years been extremely challenging for everyone whether it's in our personal lives or our professional lives. We’re working to preserve our health, our safety, our jobs, our livelihoods, our personal health and our mental health and the bullets on this slide show some of the significant investments we've made on the project to manage the spread of the virus. And I'll talk briefly about a few of these controls that we've adopted to meet and go beyond the regulatory requirements. For example we made a significant investment in medical facilities and medical staff. We’ve grown from one clinic to three on-site clinics and we have dedicated medical staff who support every confirmed COVID case and do 100% contact tracing for positive cases in closed contacts. We have our own PCR testing laboratory and we use rapid testing for voluntary and proactive testing. And everyone who mobilises to work at the site has a PCR test before their site orientation. We practice physical distancing in our offices in the lunch tents and our vehicles run at 50% occupancy. And as the state rules mask wearing is required on site. In the last few weeks we've partnered with a local pharmacy and organised on-site vaccine clinics with hundreds of doses supplied to members of the workforce who had not yet received the vaccine. In summary we’re working to manage the risk due to COVID.

[Visual]

New slide that Steve Norton will talk through

[Text displayed]

HSSE: Managing through COVID-19

[Voice of Steve Norton]

Together with the risks to construction and commissioning and as a result we've managed to continue working through the pandemic preserving 8000 direct jobs and livelihoods. And we are proud of our safety performance which is 10 times better than the US construction industry average. I’d like to hand over to my colleague Kim, who's our environment manager.

[Video footage]

Kim Kaal is visible via webcam in the top right hand corner of the screen throughout her presentation

[Visual]

Image of the Ohio River

[Text displayed]

Environmental Permitting and Monitoring

Kim Kaal

Environmental Manager

Pennsylvania Chemicals/Shell Polymers

[Voice of Kim Kaal]

Good evening everybody. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Kim Kaal, I am the environmental manager at Shell Polymers I'm pleased to be with you today. I am a Pittsburgh native, a proud Pittsburgh native. I'm from here, I was educated here and I live here. I’ve also been in the environmental field for over 30 years, you could say it’s in my DNA. I'm also very proud to be a part of this project for Shell.

[Visual]

Slide that Kim Kaal will talk through

[Text displayed]

Environmental Team Activities

[Voice of Kim Kaal]

Environment plays a very important role at our site our job is to safely and environmentally responsibly startup the plant and also support operations. I have a diverse team with a lot of experience and education with all aspects of the environment. We’ve obtained our permits in air water and waste disposal working closely with our regulators and other important stakeholders on our environmental permits. Along with these permits we’ve installed many protective systems that we use for monitoring and reporting. And reporting is a very important part of what we do. Hundreds of reports are filed each year, each of these reports are available through the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection or the United States Environmental Protection Agency online. All this information is reported publicly. Training is another aspect of things that the environmental department does, our personnel all takes general site specific environmental awareness training, and we also administer specialised training like water sampling, greenhouse gases, invisible emissions. We've incorporated hundreds of permit requirements in our management systems to ensure that we maintain our compliance and assurance.

[Visual]

New slide that Kim Kaal will talk through

[Text displayed]

Water Monitoring

[Voice of Kim Kaal]

Our water intake was installed with the best available technology in the industry designed to minimise impact to the river ecosystem. The design was reviewed by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission as well as the US Fish and Wildlife service, this means we live up to very high standards. On site water is treated, sampled, analysed and to ensure we stay within our permitted discharge limits as you saw in the video earlier today. When operational water will be treated in the wastewater treatment plants and be returned cleaner to the river than when it was taken out. We sample water daily, we analyse continuously for several different and very important parameters. Other ways we protect the water include remediation of the former zinc smelter that occupied the property before us, we removed and decommissioned the facility and covered in cap a century of historic contamination on site. In fact we moved 7.2 million cubic yards of fill to cover the entire site at an average as little as 7 feet and as much as 14 feet of fill covering the site. We also monitor groundwater with 14 on-site monitoring Wells we also reestablish Wetlands disturbed during construction both on-site as well as offsite. The offsite property Cross Creek is also within the same watershed; this property is nearly 100 acres and has restored streams and renewed native vegetation.

[Visual]

Three images of monitoring equipment share the screen

[Text displayed]

Air Monitoring

[Voice of Kim Kaal]

Our air monitoring programmes are extensive. All of our air sources have permanent control devices installed, these controls capture and destroy pollutants before they’re released to the air. Emissions are monitored in several different ways, first through our continuous emission monitoring system which are operated continuously on our stacks. Readings are monitored by our engineers and operators can see them at the board 24/7. The other way that we monitor emissions is from hundreds of points on site. Our fence side monitoring program is another way that we perform monitoring and sampling, we have 24 sampling locations around the site, once operational the sample data will be displayed on our website for all to see.

[Visual]

Images of person monitoring a system

[Text displayed]

>180,000

Monitoring Points

[Voice of Kim Kaal]

And lastly we monitor fugitive emissions with our leak detection and repair program or LDAR. The LDAR program monitors fugitive emissions from things like valves and seals. This amounts to hundreds of thousands of individual points monitored monthly. We find small and we fix small. Our monitoring requirements are the most stringent in the continental United States. When it comes to safety and the environment it is our top priority. Lastly we live in the community too, and we’re committed to protecting and sustaining our quality of life. Thank you and now over to our General Manager Bill Watson.

[Video footage]

Bill Watson is visible via webcam in the top right hand corner of the screen throughout his presentation

[Visual]

Image of Shell employees on site

[Text displayed]

Operational Insights

Bill Watson

General Manager

Pennsylvania Chemicals/Shell Polymers

[Voice of Bill Watson]

Yes thank you Kim so yes my name is Bill Watson I am the General Manager of the Shell Polymer Monaca site. Now I’ve worked for Shell for 30 years but I’ve only been a Beaver County resident for the last year but I’m really excited to be here, I’m excited to be your neighbour. 

[Visual]

Group photo of everyone working at the plant

[Text displayed]

People: Learning and Culture

Photo taken in 2019

[Voice of Bill Watson]

So I’ve got a few pictures to share with you today and my focus is really on the people of our site so do you see the picture in front of you now that’s a picture of a large number of our site employees. Just to caveat it was taken before the COVID pandemic. So we’ve talked previously about our journey to hire the team that’s going to run the facility so today as we look at that team I would like to talk about another important part of our preparation and that’s building the skills and the culture that we need to be successful. So we know that having well trained and qualified people is really critical to keeping everybody safe, caring for our people and also being a good neighbour. And so we hire people with experience in training then we invest in top notch training programmes that really utilise cutting edge technology like simulators and also virtual reality. In fact we started planning for our training three years before we even hired our first operator. And today we’ve delivered almost 80,000 person hours of training to all our employees. And that includes more than a 1000 hours of training for each one of our operators who then also have to pass a very rigorous assessment before they can be qualified to perform their job duties. Now I’ve worked for Shell for many years as I’ve mentioned and we always make sure we have people who are well trained to do their job safely but here we’ve really gone beyond what I’ve seen before in terms of the amount of training we’ve undertaken and the new approaches that I’ve mentioned that we use. So you couple that with the fantastic experience we were able to bring into the organisation from this area and I’m really confident in the level of expertise we’ve got at our front line. Now just as importantly I mentioned we talked about culture and we’ve really invested in building a culture here and the foundation of that culture is care. And it’s reflected in our commitment to safety and also being a good neighbour. Now we set the tone around this culture with an onboarding programme that all of our employees attend and we’ve had 500 attendants so far and it’s reinforced by our leaders really speaking a common language. So if we go to the next slide I want to share with you what we’ve done since the start of the year.

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Split screen of various images of the control building opening

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Central Control Building

[Voice of Bill Watson]

So in early January our utilities team moved into our brand new central control building and started a 24/7 shift rotation in preparation for our raw water systems startup that you saw the video on today. Now this slide shows a picture of our new central control building, it shows our operators arriving on their very first day and our ribbon cutting ceremony in celebration. Now this building is a state of the art facility that’s gonna house all of our operating teams once our plant is in full operation.

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Split screen of various images of the maintenance building opening

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Central Maintenance Building

[Voice of Bill Watson]

So if we go to the next slide you’ll see our brand new maintenance building, and this was handed over to us from our project team in March. Now this building will house all our maintenance team. It also has our maintenance shop and our warehouse. So we’ll repair certain equipment here and we’ll also store some of our key materials. And you can see in the pictures there our central maintenance leader Ken he’s cutting the ribbon for the building dedication ceremony which was quite a celebration on that day.

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Split screen of two images of the fire and medical building

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Fire and Medical Building

[Voice of Bill Watson]

So if we go to the next slide I’ll show you another building. This is our fire and medical building and this was handed over to our Health and Safety team back in April. So this building is going to house our emergency response teams who also work 24/7 as well as our emergency response equipment and you can see some of the pictures there with the fire engines. So our emergency response team members they’re trained to respond to both medical emergencies as well as industrial incidents and they truly are professionals.

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Split screen of various images of the administration building

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Administration Building

[Voice of Bill Watson]

If we go to the last slide finally for buildings we received custody of our brand new administration building in February that Chris mentioned. Now this building is going to house the majority of our staff on site and it is another fantastic facility. So I also want to move now and talk about what we’ve been doing in the community if we go to the next slide.

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Split screen of various images of the care being administered to the local community

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Community Care Team

[Voice of Bill Watson]

So when we realised the seriousness of COVID-19 and the profound effect it could have on our communities we created a community care team here at Shell Polymers Monaca to focus on the needs of our neighbours. Now in some cases that need was for personal protective equipment or supplies so we donated thousands of N-95 masks, nitra gloves and safety glasses to Heritage Valley, UPMC and several smaller healthcare facilities in the region. We also donated thousands of gallons of hand sanitizer to medic rescue at Beaver County and also to several schools in our region, we also took an active role in providing food and supplies to our friends and neighbours who were facing food insecurity. So we partnered with the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Beaver Country Chamber of Commerce to help us help our neighbours. And through these partnerships we were able to provide food and supplies to over 2500 families in Beaver County and the surrounding areas that was really all through the power of care and partnership. Now we also helped and continue to support many of our non-profit partners that were struggling so we donated over $125,000 to the YMCA, the Hugh Lane Foundation, Meals on Wheels, the Salvation Army and several other organisations who were just trying to keep up with requests from clients who needed help to feed their families. We also didn’t forget about our furry friends, so we sponsored and employee donation drive to the Beaver County Humane Society, now many pet owners were having trouble feeding their pets and sadly they had to turn them over to animal shelters. And our employees donated dog and cat food as well as money to the HUmane Society to help ease their burden for feeding and caring for so many animals during the pandemic. So just sharing with you some of the things that Shell has done and continues to do to help others and we do it because it is the right thing to do and we also do it because we’re a good neighbour. Now I’ll close by mentioning that we are putting together a community advisory panel or CAP as we call it to assist with our efforts to have an ongoing dialogue with the community. Now the CAP is made up of broad representation of community members including elected officials, representatives from environmental groups, non profit organisations and interested neighbours just to name a few. So the CAP meetings will provide an opportunity for Shell for us to listen to what the community has to say and the meetings are going to take place six times a year and we plan to have our very first engagement before the end of this month. If you think about the CAP as another way of establishing a kind of a real time feedback loop for issues that concern the community about our plant or about our performance. And so with that we’re going to move onto questions now. So Shannon we’re going to move onto questions now so Shannon I’m going to hand it back over to you.

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Mock up image of the Ohio River and the Pennsylvania Plant

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Questions and Answers

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Webcam view of Shannon is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

Thanks you so much Bill very much appreciate the presentation and thank you everyone this evening for sharing what you have going on and we appreciate hearing from the community during the course of the presentation and the questions that you all have and so with that I will pull some of those up here and we’ll share them with the team. So the first question we have this evening is for Chris Howell. Chris I understand the project is Shell site but Bechtel has ownership while construction is underway. Is this true and if so what does that mean in terms of structures, buildings or site emergency response?

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Webcam view of Chris is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Chris Howell]

Yes Shannon so the way that it’s constructed is that we have Bechtel that is our main works contractor who we’ve contracted to basically manage the site on our behalf during construction phase they have expertise in building facilities like this on a worldwide basis and bring that expertise to bear and manage the activities on a day-to-day basis on the site and that includes emergency response. And how we work with others if something was to happen. They’ve brought in expertise from all over. It's been a really strong relationship. They also manage the relationship with the local building trades. And so together through that code of excellence we all work together to deliver the project.

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Webcam view of Shannon is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

Thank you very much for that Chris. The next question we have for this we’ll direct to Bill. Bill this viewer is wondering about the level of employees that have been hired for operations. How many of those workers have already been hired?

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Webcam view of Bill is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Bill Watson]

So Shannon we’ve got right now we’re fully staffed with our operating personnel however we expect that at sometime in the future we’ll have openings become available and if they do and we need to fill them externally we’ll post them online at our website so I think we’ll include this after the meeting but it’s www.Shell.com/careers so you just want to enter Monaca PA as your selected location and in the event there is nothing available you can sign up for job alerts you just scroll down to the bottom of that page, provide your email address and what kind of job you’re looking for and again select our site if you were interested in working here. And Shell will email you when a position opens so you’ll get those alerts.

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Webcam view of Shannon is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

Thank you. The next question we have is for Steve. Steve I understand you have rules and guidelines you’ve been following at the site through COVID and would like to know what the rules and guidelines are you’ll be following every day once COVID-19 hopefully passes and the site moves to operation?

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Webcam view of Steve is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Steve Norton]

Yeah thank you Shannon I think we all look forward to the day when COVID passes. So one of the challenges we’ve had is COVID requirements were on top of the existing safety requirements on the site because the construction and commissioning risks were still there so the workforce had to adapt to new ways of working and follow the existing rules that we had in place. And I'll say few words about some of those rules so we expect everyone who's working for Shell to do three things. Firstly to comply with the safety rules and regulations relevant to their work. Secondly to intervene, to prevent unsafe acts and conditions and thirdly to respect their fellow workers and the communities in which they work. And it's is required of leaders working at Shell to make sure the rules are clear to the teams and everyone working for us so we have what we call our life saving rules. And these rules were introduced across Shell globally in 2009. The rules are based on the positive actions we can take to prevent serious injuries and they've had a really positive impact in reducing injuries at work. And they've now been adopted across the entire oil and gas industry. Another thing we do is we have our annual Safety Day it gives our employees and contractors the opportunities to learn how we should all help to manage safety hazards in work and to share ideas with each other. And finally I’ll just mention one more thing every year at Shell we have our annual company-wide CEO awards. In 2020 there were over 400 nominations from around the world for those awards and I'm very pleased to say that this project, the Pennsylvania Chemicals Project in 2020 won the Safety Award for improving safety whilst were managing COVID and preserving jobs and livelihoods, so very proud of the workforce and how they're working to safely achieve these global awards from Shell.

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Webcam view of Shannon is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

Thank you Steve. The next question we have for Scott. Scott earlier as you were sharing with the community sound levels we have a question we understand that there is compliance with municipal rules and regulations on sound. What is the volume that the steam blows are anticipated to function at and you mentioned what they would sound like can you repeat that portion of what you shared.

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Webcam view of Scott is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Scott Thompson]

Yeah sure thanks Shannon it's really good question. So at the exit points for the steam blows they will be quite loud. We use the silencers to reduce the sound as much as possible but our employees in the vicinity of those exit points will be wearing both single and double hearing protection as required to keep them safe. The location of those exit points are mostly in the centre of our facility which allows the sound to dissipate before it actually gets to the fence line and so that's where we look at the community ordinance levels from the Township and we ensure that we stay below those for the entire duration of the steam blows so that's what we're looking to do. We’ve done a bunch of noise studies that show that were conservatively below that and we’ll monitor that as we actually start operations to ensure that that’s the case and adjust operations if we need to, to make sure that we’re complying.

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Webcam view of Shannon is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

Thank you. And the next question is for Chris and I think we have several folks asking this when will the site be operational?

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Webcam view of Chris is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Chris Howell]

That’s a great question. I think we are working very hard, you know, obviously the pandemic was a challenge for us back in 2020 when we did have to suspend operations for some time there to put in the controls to deal with the pandemic. So that cost us a bit of time but we are making good progress we’re really into that phase now as you see where we are starting to liven up systems, we're starting to bring our water treatment online, we’re bringing our power generation online here shortly. And so we’ll still be at that for some time here and we'll get into that as we drive to complete this facility and get it all operational.

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Webcam view of Shannon is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

Thank you and the next question is for Kim. Kim how does this sites monitoring compare to other sites in the United States.

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Webcam view of Kim is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Kim Kaal]

I’m glad you asked that we’re one of the most heavily monitored sites in the US and talking with my colleagues in the Gulf Coast they’re amazed that for example our LDAR programmes cover both the ethane and methane lines as well as COGEN as a matter of fact we just completed tagging in the COGEN area which is very comparatively small part of our site and we sat out over 2300 tags so that’s a lot. That’s not certainly all the monitoring that we do, we have an extensive amount of monitoring on site for both air and water incorporating those requirements into systems and other things like that is very important because of course the environmental team can't do it alone.

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Webcam view of Shannon is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

Thank you and the next question is for Steve. Steve what is the project doing to support COVID vaccinations for the workforce.

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Webcam view of Steve is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Steve Norton]

Yeah thanks Shannon. So what we’ve done is we’ve organised vaccine clinics on the site and as I said earlier our objective is to protect the workforce the families and the community and we wanted to make it easy for our workforce for those of them that wanted to to get a vaccine and by organising the clinics on site we made that possible. And we did it by partnering with the local Monaca pharmacy who really did an excellent job so they provided the competent and trained staff, the equipment and the vaccine doses and we've now run four of these vaccine clinics in the last couple of weeks and we provided hundreds of vaccines for the members of our workforce who hadn't yet received it and wanted to receive the vaccine. So yeah we been running these clinics to just to make it easy for our workforce, if you work in construction it's not easy to find the time to go out and get a vaccine so we made it easier for a workforce to do that.

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Webcam view of Shannon is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

Thank you. The next question we have is for Chris. When will we start to see the traffic and busses decrease?

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Webcam view of Chris is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Chris Howell]

Yes so you’ll start to see some of that later this year as we continue to progress. So obviously as we finish these units we can start to reduce the number of construction workers that we have on-site. I do expect at some point here depending upon how the COVID controls mature and what the state has done and we’ve seen some recent announcements there that we would like to move towards to less bussing on site so hopefully we can transition to that here in the next month or so to reduce some of the bus traffic. And then that traffic that we have overall will continue to decrease as we’re getting to the second half of this year. So I think you'll still going to see traffic with construction folks definitely into the first part of next year and then we'll continue on a downward trend as we continue to handover facilities to the operations team.

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Webcam view of Shannon is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

Next question is for Kim. Kim Shell has promised the community that fence line monitoring be done when will the report sharing begin?

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Webcam view of Kim is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Kim Kaal]

Sure thanks for asking. So we’re setting up our fenceline monitoring right now. We’ll be sharing the data from the fenceline monitoring upon operation and it will be posted on the website for all to see. We have a set of continuous air monitors and there are four of those we have a meteorological station as well as twenty perimetres samples for passive air monitoring. And the data will be available upon operation.

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Webcam view of Shannon is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

Thank you. The next question that we have is for Scott. Scott folks are reflecting on the steam blow discussion that you had earlier it mentioned around odours and I understand it can be you know very concerning or confusing if odour can be associated with steam bows or not and then also any other odours that may be anticipated with any operation of the facility can you add some more clarification and shed some light on that for folks?

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Webcam view of Scott is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Scott Thompson]

Thanks Shannon so as I mentioned earlier in the presentation we do not expect any odour from the steam blow operation. I don’t know but I’ve had a teapot on my stove and I've tried to smell steam and it doesn't smell anything to me so I’m not aware of any odours that come from that and that’s the same type of operation that we’ll have going on at site. The site does have a wastewater treatment plant with biological activity, we fully expect that you know there won’t be any odours from that plant either that migrate across our fence line or out into the community so this site you know should be odour free and anything if we do smell something it's it's abnormal and it’s something that we’d want feedback on that we can address as quickly as possible but again that shouldn't be the case through our operation.

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Webcam view of Shannon is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

And Kim is there anything that you can share on that as well? I know that’s a question you’ve received from the community as Environmental Manager?

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Webcam view of Kim is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Kim Kaal]

I don’t anticipate. I’m aligned with Scott, I don’t have anything to share but I will share that leak detection repair will be happening within 30 days of start up of COGEN which is also the same area that Scott’s in.

[Video footage]

Webcam view of Shannon is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

Thank you. Let’s see what else we have here. There is a question for Bill, what is the difference between a cracker plant or a type of facility that we have and a refinery?

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Webcam view of Bill is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Bill Watson]

Sure Shannon. So a refinery it takes crude oil and then it turns that into fuel. So it maybe gasoline, it maybe diesel fuel, jet fuel or LPG. Our cracker plant it’s a chemical plant so the difference there is that a chemical plant takes different types of feedstocks and in our case we’re going to take ethane and then they turn it into a chemical product that has use so we’ll make polyethene with ours. Which of course goes into all sorts of things packaging, car parts you name it. Refinery makes fuels, chemical plants make all sorts of other useful products.

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Webcam view of Shannon is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

Our next question is for Chris I think we have time for just about two more questions. What are or why don’t the big cranes have lights on them aren’t they required for air traffic. My sister is visiting, she’s also a civil engineer who oversees big bridge projects and their cranes require lights on the booms.

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Webcam view of Chris is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Chris Howell]

Yeah so actually our cranes do have lights on them so we’re in compliance with the FAA requirements that any large crane over 200ft in length does need lighting on it so we have the aviation lights on all our large cranes we regularly maintain those on site there to make sure they’re operational with compliance. So yeah we’re very active with making sure all of our structures have the required aviation lights before we use any of that equipment or we place the structures into position.

[Video footage]

Webcam view of Shannon is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

And the final question we have time for is for Scott. This is one a few people may be wondering about. I have seen workers at the plant out in the community in fluorescent clothes before, now I’m seeing red jumpsuits. What are those for and do they mean anything in terms of work at the plant?

[Video footage]

Webcam view of Scott is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Scott Thompson]

Thanks Shannon. I don’t know who asked that question but they may have seen me out there today as I left work I was in the community for a bit before I came home and that was in the red FRC that we call it. So that’s our flame resistant clothing in Shell we call them our ‘reds’ and all our petrochemical facilities and refineries around the world it’s used at every single one of them it’s a piece of PPE, personal protective equipment and we utilise it to keep our folks safe. While we don’t envision any abnormal situations that would require it they can happen so we wanna make sure our folks have the PPE required to keep them safe no matter what. And that’s just one of the tools that we use at our facility. You’ll see more and more of that as more of our operations and maintenance folks continue to come on site and work on site over the next several months and they’ll be out in the community as well with everyone else. The fluorescents did its job for us and continues to do its job to help keep us safe during construction. So imagine 8000 folks on a work site there’s a lot of hustle and bustle at the site constructing our facility so we wanna make sure everybody can be seen at all times especially with all the heavy equipment moving around and as our site starts to reduce the workforce you’ll see less and less of the fluorescent and more of the red FRC’s being used at our facility.

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Webcam view of Shannon is visible in the top right hand corner of the screen

[Voice of Shannon Debes]

Thank you so much for that Scott. And with that we will wrap up with just a few minutes remaining here. So I want to share with you all of our contact information, whether you’re joining us by phone or can see this on the screen we’re available to you by email by phone, through social media and on our webpage and those are listed here. Here our email address is shellchecmicalsproject@shell.com for those of you on the phone and our phone number is 1-844-776-5581 and you can also find us on facebook messenger at Shell Pennsylvania Chemicals. And additionally this presentation will be made available online on our website www.shell.us/poly-e in the near future as well as some of the questions that we weren’t able to get to this evening. So thank you again so very much for joining us.

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Aerial view of the plant

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Summary

Presentation and Q and A will be made available online post event

Contact us any time

shellchecmicalsproject@shell.com

1-844-776-5581

Facebook Messenger: Shell Pennsylvania Chemicals

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Shell pecten on white background