What Converters Should Know as Our Polyethylene Plant Gears Up
At Shell Polymers, we don’t want to be simply a resin source; we want to be a business resource our customers can rely upon, time after time.
A Polymer Plant Near You, Leveraging Tech for Reliability
Reliability and availability are so critical to your success and competitiveness, which is why we’ve weaved location and digitization into our brand-new plant design.
Have you ever wondered, “Where can I find polymers near me?” We did, too. While most polymer suppliers are near the Gulf, Shell Polymers built our polyethylene plant on the Ohio River in Monaca, Pennsylvania. This location strategically places us within 700 miles of most North American polyethylene buyers.
Plus, we’ve introduced a program that will combine embedded sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) to help avert trips in critical equipment such as compressors and extruders. Additionally, thousands of sensors across the equipment will track critical variables such as temperature, pressure, and vibration, and the AI’s algorithms will learn to identify when issues are developing.
A Polyethylene Plant Optimized for Resilience
Because of our plant’s designed resilience, we can mitigate production challenges and continue to get polyethylene to you.
With three gas turbine generators, three heat recovery units, and two steam turbine generators, our co-generation unit generates all of the plant’s power — allowing our site to be 100% self-sufficient. It also gives us the ability to operate in “island mode,” which will automatically isolate the plant if there is an external disturbance in the grid, reducing risk and making our power source more reliable.
To further enable consistency of resin supply to our customers, we engineered and designed our plant with a strong focus on maintaining operations through all seasons, including harsh winter conditions. To that end, we built the plant with a heat trace electrical system to maintain or raise the temperature of pipes and valves.
The plant’s electric heat tracing system is designed for sustained air temperatures of -25 C (-13 F). This is important for customers as cold air temperature won't freeze water in our pipes, preventing pipe bursts and shutdowns. We’ve also taken mitigation steps with our plant in case of flooding. The lowest elevation for the plant is 14 feet above the 100-year flood stage for the Ohio River. Plus, most of the plant will be 80-100 feet above that level.
A Polymer Supplier Focused on Quality AND Quantity
Located in your backyard, our Pennsylvania Innovation Center is fundamental to the resin qualification process and ongoing quality control. It also helps us live out our customer-centric model by enabling us to collaborate with customers to help raise operational performance, solve challenges, trial new product solutions, and troubleshoot issues. It consists of:
- An Analytical Lab, which analyzes and verifies resin is molecularly correct;
- Polymer Science Labs, where we perform studies to characterize the mechanical, processing, and visual properties of a polymer;
- Our Application Hall, which is home to commercial-scale, state-of-the-art equipment to help with resin qualification;
- Shell’s knowledgeable industry experts, who will work directly with you to help you glean technical insights and perform preliminary tests on our lines to ensure that our resins will perform well on your lines.
A Transparent Polymer Supply That Gets To You Quickly
We’re not asking converters to choose between quality and quickness. We deliver quality supply, quickly. At Shell Polymers, our multimodal capability gives you the flexibility of truck and the volume of rail.
Our railcar practices and proximity to major railways as well as our GPS tracking capability ensure you have a reliable supply that meets your quality specifications. Our railcars are epoxy coated and vented to help avoid condensation and contamination of your product and assist in the ease of unloading.
We also have a modern railcar de-heeling and wash facility to reduce the risk of cross-contamination from prior cargo. Through GPS technology, converters like you can pinpoint where railcars are and receive an estimation of when the material will be delivered.
Plus, we can switch from loading a railcar to loading a truck directly from our site if the need arises, thanks to our extensive on-site silo network. Our state-of-the-art silo to top truck loading network can load trucks within 20 minutes and have them on the road within 2 hours. While also helping us to load, our new silos help preserve the material's quality as top loading minimizes the number of touchpoints typically seen with truck deliveries.
A Customer (Real)ationship Experience Unlike Any Other
Shell Polymers doesn’t simply want to redefine how to produce and ship polymers. We want to reinvigorate the supplier-customer relationship and create what we call (Real)ationships. We see the value in establishing and building relationships. So, to that end:
- From start to finish, everyone gets a personal, professional experience, no matter where they are in their business journey.
- We're real people who want a comfortable, casual, and authentic conversation with you.
- We will be engaged, enthusiastic, excited, animated, and invested in the customer. We’re not just transactional.
Also, we provide a “welcome home” mentality to all converters. That means we believe all ideas are worthy of collaboration and are open to ideas, no matter the size of the converter. With new products and our help and support, smaller converters can grow into larger converters, and larger converters can maximize their business opportunities.
