Houston Chronicle: Ethane’s sweet trek from Houston to Vietnam and back

Third in a series

Ethane’s sweet trek from Houston to Vietnam and back

Byproduct of Texas shale gas turns region into world supplier of plastics

By Jordan Blum STAFF WRITER

Open a bag of frozen shrimp from Walmart. Toss the packaging in the trash.

Two routine tasks, but they represent final commercial destinations for ethane molecules freed from Texas shale, a journey that has taken them not only hundreds of miles to Houston’s massive petrochemical complex, but also around the world and back again in the carefully choreographed dance of global supply chains.

Each day, hundreds of trucks and rail cars move pellets of ethane-derived polyethylene from petrochemical plants, such as Exxon Mobil’s in Mont Belvieu, to the Port of Houston. There, the pellets are loaded by the ton onto container ships and bound for ports like Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, where the molecules of hydrogen and carbon will be transformed yet again — into plastic wrap, trash bags and packaging for farm-raised shrimp found in freezer sections of grocery stores in Houston and across the country.

Ultimately, the shipments of polyethylene, the world’s most common plastic, will bring billions of dollars into the Houston economy and generate jobs for factory workers, longshore workers and truck drivers. Patrick Jankowski, chief economist at the Greater Houston Partnership, estimates the growth in U.S. plastics exports — dominated by the Gulf Coast and expected to double by 2030 — will have created some 10,000 local jobs in the region by early next decade.

“Nobody could have ever foreseen the U.S. becoming a major exporter of plastics,” said Neil Chapman, a senior vice president at Exxon Mobil. “It’s a byproduct of shale gas. That’s what’s truly amazing about this breakthrough.”

Industrial orchestra

Roughly three-fourths of the nation’s waterborne polyethylene exports leave from the Port of Houston, which is expected to move some 7 billion pounds of the plastic this year, up 35 percent from 2017. Each day, hundreds of 40-foot containers filled with plastics resins, primarily polyethylene pellets, are shipped from the port.

The container terminal seems a cacophony of noises — roaring trucks, whirring cranes and clanking containers. But each piece of equipment has specific notes to play in an industrial symphony that requires precision.

The newest cranes, which reach nearly 300 feet into the sky and cost $11 million each, can load an average of 35 containers an hour, reaching across ships that are 22 containers or nearly 180 feet wide. Four cranes can load a ship, which typically carries about 2,500 containers, in about 18 hours.

Louis Alberti, a crane operator for the past 15 years, routinely lifts two 20-foot containers at a time in a maneuver called “twin picking.” He swings them up and over stacks of containers on the ship and tucks them into tight, secure positions, where they’ll stay for the weekslong ocean crossing.

Alberti, 48, is among the workers benefiting from the boom in plastic exports, which has led to more hiring, more overtime, and extended hours at the port, which now operates until 11 p.m. Alberti’s 22-year-old son, Jimmy, recently got a longshore job at the port, while Alberti, a third-generation longshore worker, is racking up overtime.

With new night shifts that pay time-and-a-half, Alberti said he has doubled his annual earnings from roughly $100,000 to $200,000 by working 60 to 80 hours a week.

“It’s hard, but you have to work through it,” said Alberti, 48. “I can’t imagine having a 9-to-5 job. I’d probably be bored.”

Polyethylene accounts for about 15 percent of the cargo leaving the Port of Houston’s Bayport container terminal. After the ships are loaded, they will navigate what has become the nation’s busiest ship channel. Vessels routinely squeeze through the narrow waterway by aiming directly at an oncoming ship before getting pushed safely aside by the water pressure generated by the wakes. The pilots call it “Texas chicken.”

Within a few hours, the ships will reach the Gulf of Mexico, beginning a two- to three-week journey that will take them through the Panama Canal into the Pacific Ocean and on to Asia.

Next stop: Singapore

The Port of Singapore is the world’s biggest transshipment port — an intermediate stop where cargoes are unloaded, then reloaded onto the other ships that will take the containers to their ultimate destinations.

This is where Alex Dam makes his polyethylene connection.

Dam is executive vice president of Thanh Phu Plastic Packaging, a Vietnamese company that makes packaging for brands such as the Chicken of the Sea, a unit of Thai Union International, and Huggies disposable diapers, made by Irving-based company Kimberly-Clark.

Just a few years ago, Dam said, his company was buying polyethylene pellets, also called resins, from Middle Eastern and Asian chemical-makers, which sold them more cheaply than U.S. companies. Then came the flood of ethane.

“The shale gas is changing a lot of the trend,” Dam said.

Exxon Mobil sells a premium resin to Thanh Phu Plastic Packaging, which typically orders 10 containers, or 250 tons, of polyethylene pellets at a time, shipped from Singapore to the port in Ho Chi Minh City. Dam’s plant is located about 15 miles from the port, in the southwestern part of the city.

The plant’s operations are run primarily by computers, which control a process known as “blown film” to turn polyethylene pellets into flexible plastic packaging. The tiny pellets are fed by the thousands into a hopper, then funneled into a heated tube, where they are melted, compressed, formed into circles and inflated into spheres, much like glass blowing.

“We make it like a bubble,” Dam explained.

Rising middle class

The automated process forms the bubbles into different shapes and thicknesses by adding thin layers of polyethylene — so thin they are invisible to the human eye. The blown plastic is then cooled and run through rollers that flatten them into rows of film.

The number of layers in the packaging depends on the products they will protect. Plastic bags that hold seafood, for instance, are thicker and stronger so they won’t crack when frozen. Diaper packaging is thinner, more flexible and soft to the touch.

About 500 people work in the plant, about the same as 10 years ago. The critical difference is many of the jobs have shifted from assembly-line work to skilled positions requiring technical abilities, computer literacy and higher levels of education. Today, 1 in 5 of the plant’s employees are engineers, part of arising middle class that is fueling a rapidly growing consumer economy in Asia.

The global middle class is forecast to more than double from 2 billion people in 2010 to more than 5 billion by 2030, with Asia accounting for 90 percent of the increase, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. As middle classes grow in places like Vietnam, China and India, the demand for electronics, cars, food and other consumer products, all with components or packaging made of plastic, is expected to follow.

Global polyethylene demand is growing about 4 percent a year, projected to hit 100 million metric tons — more than five times North American consumption — in 2018 and 120 million tons by 2023.

That trend is driving the billions of dollars in petrochemical investment along the Gulf Coast, with nearly all of it targeting foreign markets. For example, all of the polyethylene produced from Exxon Mobil’s $6 billion expansion in Mont Belvieu and Baytown is headed overseas.

“This is areally dynamic market,” said Cindy Shulman, Exxon Mobil’s vice president of plastics and resins. “It’s growing because global living standards around the world continue to improve, and that’s a great thing.”

Price of progress

All this progress has not come without costs, some dear, to the environment. Fears are growing that the world is drowning in plastics; measured by weight, there could be more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050, according to the Plastic Pollution Coalition, an environmental advocacy group.

About one-third of all plastics are used once and thrown away. Of the world’s roughly 6.5 billion metric tons of plastic waste, only 9 percent was recycled and 12 percent incinerated. The rest is sitting in landfills, oceans or other parts of the environment, where it will take more than 400 years for much of it to degrade.

If production and waste management trends continue, 12 billion metric tons of plastic waste — equivalent to the weight of 35,000 Empire State buildings — will be in landfills or the environment by midcentury, according to a study by the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Georgia. At least 8 million tons of plastic end up in the world’s oceans each year.

Neil Carman, clean air director of the Lone Star Chapter of the national advocacy group Sierra Club, said he worries more about the impact of drilling, fracking and petrochemical processes. Exxon Mobil’s Baytown complex, for example, has a history of exceeding air pollution limits, which last year led to a federal court to impose $20 million in penalties on Exxon Mobil. The company is appealing.

At well sites, emissions from diesel engines that power fracking foul the air while disposal wells used to hold spent fracking water have been linked to an increase in earthquakes. The main component of natural gas, methane, is a powerful greenhouse gas that escapes during drilling and production, contributing to climate change.

“We’re still in the process of uncovering these enormous public health and environmental effects,” Carman said. “We’re not doing enough to assess these impacts and address them.”

Industry responds

Exxon Mobil and other petrochemical-makers are researching ways to increase the amount of recycled materials in their products while developing thinner, lighter plastics that use less material while maintaining their strength and flexibility.

Shulman said the thinner and stronger plastics allow companies to use 40 percent less packaging. That means less plastic is required for each product, reducing the amount that gets thrown out.

“It costs less to ship these products. They take up less room on the shelves,” she said. “They keep food fresh longer.”

Chicken of Sea’s frozen shrimp, protected in the packaging made in Vietnam, will end up on freezer shelves in stores such as Walmart, Target and Kroger, and ultimately on the plates of consumers in Houston and around the country. As families tuck into gumbos or seafood stews, they probably won’t give a second thought to packaging that brought the shrimp from farm to table, or the trash bag where the packaging will end up.

They are merely conveniences of modern life, conveniences made possible by a natural gas well called Eagles in East Texas and thousands of others like it in shale fields across America. [email protected] twitter.com/jdblum23

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Houston Chronicle: In petrochemical boom, ‘all roads lead to Baytown’

Shared from the 2018-09-17 Houston Chronicle eEdition

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Second in a series

In petrochemical boom, ‘all roads lead to Baytown’

Natural gas liquids from shale fields processed, transformed into plastics

By Jordan Blum STAFF WRITER

MONT BELVIEU — They say geography is destiny, but in this small city east of Houston, the force shaping its history, economy and future is geology.

Mont Belvieu is built atop a salt dome formed more than 100 million years ago from deposits likely left by an ancient inland sea that cut across the North American continent. For more than 60 years, energy companies have used it as a natural storage tank, carving out salt caverns some 3,000 feet deep to hold millions of barrels of petroleum products.

Today, those caverns are increasingly filled with ethane and other natural gas liquids that feed the plastics and chemical industries, making Mont Belvieu and its neighbor to the south, Baytown, the focal point of the Gulf Coast petrochemical boom. Here, where rice fields once stretched as far as the eye could see, Exxon Mobil alone has invested some $6 billion to dramatically expand its 36-year-old plastics plant as well as its sprawling refining and chemicals complex in Bay-town.

At these plants, the ethane molecules that squeezed through fissures in shale rock, flowed up a Texas well and traveled more than 150 miles by pipeline will undergo chemical changes to transform them from once-overlooked byproducts of oil and gas drilling into one of most ubiquitous materials on earth. Hundreds of other pipelines stretching across Texas and beyond will carry millions more barrels of natural gas liquids from U.S. shale fields, converging near the salt dome under Mont Belvieu’s Barbers Hill.

“All roads lead to Texas,” said Kim Haas, Exxon Mobil’s operations manager, “and specifically the Bay-town area.”

Hydrogen meets carbon

Barbers Hill rises 85 feet above sea level, a mile-wide distortion in an otherwise flat landscape. First settled more than 175 years ago and named for an early rancher, Amos Barber, the area began attracting oilmen after another salt dome called Spindletop began gushing crude in 1901.

The first successful Barbers Hill oil well was drilled in 1916, and annual production peaked at more than 8 million barrels in 1931. About 25 years later, Barbers Hill got asecond life when Warren Petroleum, a Tulsa company now part of Chevron, starting drilling caverns to store petroleum products.

The community, however, was jolted in 1985 by fires on Barbers Hill that killed two Warren workers, forced the evacuation of Mont Belvieu’s 2,000 residents, and led the city to distribute letters to newcomers warning of the “serious danger and possible death” that came with living there. The population fell to about 1,300 by 1990.

But with improved safety, the recent petrochemical boom has revived the community, whose population has more than doubled since 2000 to about 6,000 residents. Today, Barbers Hill sits atop roughly 150 caverns potentially holding some 300 million barrels of petroleum products.

This is the next stop for the natural gas liquids produced by Exxon’s subsidiary XTO Energy. Here, processing plants known as fractionators use varying pressures and temperatures to break the natural gas liquids into components, each with a slightly different combination of carbon and hydrogen, including butane (C4H10), propane (C3H8), pentane (C5H12) and, of course, ethane (C2H6).

The ethane is piped 10 miles to Exxon Mobil’s Bay-town complex, which is simultaneously one of the nation’s oldest and most modern plants. The refinery was built nearly a century ago by one of Exxon Mobil’s predecessor companies, Humble Oil. A chemical plant was added in 1979 and expanded in 1997.

Four year ago, Exxon Mobil launched another Baytown expansion, which, with the associated expansion of the sister plant in Mont Belvieu, is the company’s biggest U.S. industrial investment since Exxon and Mobil merged 20 years ago. The projects vastly increase Exxon Mobil’s capacity to process ethane into ethylene, the basic chemical building block of most plastics, and then into the most common plastic, polyethylene.

At the peak of construction, nearly 6,000 people worked at the two sites. The expanded Baytown facility, which began operations in late July, can produce about 9 billion pounds of petrochemicals a year, including 3.3 billion additional pounds of ethylene.

The focus of the Baytown expansion was eight furnaces, each costing more than $100 million and standing 23 stories tall — nearly the height of NRG Stadium . The furnaces, built in Thailand, are the heart of aplant known as a cracker, which gets its name from the process that uses extreme heat to crack ethane molecules in half and trigger chemical reactions that form ethylene.

Kevin Campbell keeps track of much of the process in his job as a hot ends coordinator, monitoring the operations and safety of the furnaces — the “hot end” of the cracking process. These control room jobs can easily pay $70,000 a year.

Exxon Mobil runs four overlapping 12-hour shifts, the first beginning at 4 a.m. Campbell, who works an early shift, sits in acontrol room, darkened to make it easier to see his console, where he’s observing digital images and the constant flow of data to track furnace operations.

He and his colleagues compare the job to flying an airplane, mostly uneventful, but requiring strict oversight and cool, rapid decision-making when needed.

“Right now it’s calm,” Campbell said. “But it’s not boring. It’s very exciting.”

99.9 percent pure

The ethane enters the Baytown plant as a gas, fed by pipeline into a furnace, where it’s injected with steam and heated to more than 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to melt gold and silver.

In less than a half-second, the process breaks the ethane molecules, which contain two carbon and six hydrogen atoms, into two radicals each containing one atom of carbon and three of hydrogen. That frees the carbon and hydrogen atoms to recombine, forming ethylene, made of two atoms of carbon and four of hydrogen (C2H4), as well as byproducts such as propylene (C3H6), carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen sulfide (H2S).

The heated gas then moves through a series of towers, where it is cooled, reheated, pressurized and cooled again — to minus-200 degrees — to remove byproducts and impurities. Finally, the ethylene is funneled through a 355-foot tower known as a splitter, where any remaining ethane is removed and recycled.

The result: 99.95 percent pure ethylene.

The ethylene is piped back to Mont Belvieu, where some will be stored in the salt caverns, but most will feed another process that will change the hydrocarbons liberated from Texas shale once again.

Where the Baytown complex used heat and pressure to crack ethane into ethylene, Exxon Mobil’s Mont Belvieu plant relies on chemical reactions to fuse trillions of ethylene molecules into polyethylene.

The process begins in a chemical reactor, a tall cylindrical tower that’s fed ethylene by pipelines at least 10 inches in diameter. The reactor operates like a blender, mixing ethylene with a catalyst made from silica, alumina and proprietary materials that Exxon Mobil won’t disclose.

The catalyst, a fine powder that feels like dust, sparks a chemical reaction that fuses the ethylene molecules together. By mixing different catalysts from specific materials, manufacturers can produce different grades of plastic with varying levels of strength and flexibility.

The Mont Belvieu plant opened in 1982, producing mainly low-grade, flexible polyethylene used in plastic wrap and food packaging, and expanded nine years later to produce plastic for more rigid products, such as milk bottles. The most recent expansion, completed late last year, is dedicated to high-performance polyethylene that is light, flexible and strong.

Paul Fritsch is the plant manager. Achemical engineer by training, he has worked with Exxon for nearly three decades, overseeing expansions as far away as Singapore. He can touch almost any plastic in a supermarket and identify the type of polyethylene.

“When I go grocery shopping,” he said, “I pick up the packaging and look to see if it’s one of our customers.”

Made in America

Polyethylene comes out of the chemical reactors as a powder, similar to laundry detergent. It’s fed into a purging tower where nitrogen and steam remove any residual ethylene and hydrocarbons that didn’t properly bond.

The powder is then transported to hoppers that funnel the material to an extruder, which melts the plastic, compresses it and pushes out dough-like strands of polyethylene, much like a pasta maker. Each extruder can churn out 200,000 pounds of polyethylene an hour.

As the strands come through the extruder, they are sliced by a large spinning blade into semi-translucent pellets. The pellets go into a centrifuge, where they are cooled by water, then spun dry, much as a salad spinner pulls moisture from lettuce leaves.

After quality testing, the plastic is loaded into as many as 35 rail-cars, each holding about 200,000 pounds of polyethylene pellets, and shipped throughout the country to customers who shape the polyethylene pellets into finished plastics products. About 40 percent of the polyethylene is made for the domestic market.

Polyethylene pellets marked for export are mechanically packaged in 55-pound bags, each holding about 1 million pellets. Every hour, the plant fills about 10,000 bags, which are loaded onto pallets, each holding 55 bags, and trucked to a 70-acre storage yard. As many as 100,000 pallets are kept for up to 45 days until they can be loaded into containers and shipped out of the Port of Houston.

“Our production is 24 hours a day,” Fritsch explained, “but the Port of Houston isn’t open 24-7.”

With the expansions completed, Exxon Mobil’s Mont Belvieu and Baytown campuses together cover about 3,400 acres, the equivalent of three Houston downtowns. The Mont Belvieu plant, which has doubled its polyethylene output to 5.5 billion pounds a year, is now the second-largest plastics plant in the world, after the Borogue complex in Abu Dhabi.

The Baytown and Mount Belvieu plants together employ 7,500 people, and Exxon Mobil estimates that the number doubles to 15,000 when counting contractors and jobs at local suppliers, restaurants and other businesses that support the plant. Exxon pays more than $150 million a year in local taxes and fees.

The plants also have contributed to a surge in exports that has made Houston one of few regions in the country that exports more than it imports. That brings new money into the area — tens of billions of dollars that can be used to expand business, hire workers and increase wealth.

“We’re going to have things that are made in America again and getting shipped overseas,” Fritsch said. “That’s what’s exciting about shale gas. It’s the explosion of industry again in the U.S.” [email protected] twitter.com/jdblum23

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Houston Chronicle: How a molecule changed the Gulf Coast — and the world

First in a series

How a molecule changed the Gulf Coast — and the world

Ethane flowing from shale fields is triggering a petrochemical boom that’s reshaping markets

By Jordan Blum STAFF WRITER

SAN AUGUSTINE — Working in nearly 100-degree heat, sweating through mud-stained coveralls, four roustabouts wrestled with 30-foot sections of pipe that would follow a drill bit plunging some 13,000 feet into the earth, then turning nearly 90 degrees to chew through another 10,000 feet.

Over the next few weeks, the well would be drilled, fracked and completed, freeing molecules of hydrogen and carbon that would rush through fissures in the dense shale rock and flow through the well as natural gas. But accompanying the natural gas particles was another, more complex molecule, containing two atoms of carbon each attached to three atoms of hydrogen.

That molecule, described chemically as C2H6, is transforming the Gulf Coast economy and reshaping global markets, from Europe to the Middle East and Asia. Known as ethane, the molecule is the catalyst for the petrochemical boom that has attracted tens of billions of dollars of investment, created tens of thousands of construction and manufacturing jobs, expanded exports, and fed the growing demand for consumer goods in China, India and other developing nations.

The impact of ethane is perhaps the most remarkable development in the remarkable story of the shale revolution. Less than three years ago, ethane was a largely unwanted byproduct of oil and gas drilling, much of it burned away in the natural gas stream flowing to power plants, businesses and homes, or flared off at well sites.

But today, ethane is feedstock for nearly half of U.S. plastics production and a valuable export to chemical companies around the world. As ethane flows from Texas shale fields, chemical and energy companies are building and expanding plants to take advantage of the cheap, plentiful raw material, plowing more than $140 billion into the Gulf Coast alone.

“It’s absolutely extraordinary this is happening in the United States,” said Neil Chapman, Exxon Mobil senior vice president. “I can assure you nobody predicted this in 2000 or even 2005.”

U.S. ethane production is projected to reach 2 million barrels a day by 2020, double the output at the height of the last drilling boom in 2014. On the journey from wellhead to market, ethane molecules will change forms several times as they are separated from natural gas, heated to become ethylene, processed into polyethylene, and ultimately extruded and molded into packaging and products that will appear on shelves in stores from Houston to Mumbai.

But it all starts here, at a natural gas well in East Texas.

Dancing with pipe

The Haynesville shale stretches across 9,000 square miles, straddling much of the Texas and Louisiana border. XTO Energy, a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil, began drilling the shale here a decade ago.

This particular drilling site is nicknamed Eagles — XTO names its sites after college mascots — and the well called Eagles DU #H1, the DU for drilling unit and the H for Haynesville. On a blistering July day, the 170-foot-tall rig had already made the turn from vertical to horizontal drilling, a gradual process that entails shifting at 10-degree angles every 100 feet until the bit travels sideways.

Oil field workers ran more pipe into the well, manipulating the rig’s 10,000-pound, hydraulically-powered tongs, called an iron roughneck, to screw the pipe sections together and drive them into the well. About 100 pieces of 30-foot steel piping laid next to the rig, each lifted by cables and guided by workers until it was vertical, awaiting the grasp of the iron roughneck.

“It’s kind of like a dance,” said Rick Cannon, an XTO vice president of production operations. “The pipe is pretty flexible, but you have to go slow.”

The Haynesville region was among the first shale formations exploited by the drilling and fracking techniques that spurred the shale revolution. Adecade ago, pioneering companies such as Chesapeake Energy of Oklahoma City and Petrohawk Energy of Houston began drilling the shale play to unlock natural gas reserves long thought to be inaccessible. XTO wasn’t far behind.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates the Haynes-ville holds about 175 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, the nation’s second-largest gas reserve after the Appalachia region, which includes the Marcellus and Utica plays. Haynes-ville production hit a record 10.4 billion cubic feet of gas a day in 2011, fell to 6 billion cubic feet day in 2016 as natural gas prices plunged, but has since rebounded to 8.5 billion cubic feet a day.

As temperatures rose above 95 degrees, the men kept feeding the pipe to the rig, laboring through relentless heat and humidity. The work would go on 24 hours a day, in 12 hour shifts, interrupted only by mechanical failures and lightning, which can strike the tall, metal rigs.

Over the 40 days it took to drill the well, anywhere from six to 20 people worked at the site at any given time. Drillers and directional drillers piloted the process. Mud loggers monitored the geology, gas flow and drilling fluids. Floor-hands — better known as roughnecks — kept the drilling area and piping clean and organized. The company man, or well site manager, oversaw the operation.

Drilling pipe, which follows the drill bit and sets the well, would later be removed and replaced by casing pipe, cemented in place to line the well and give it structural stability, and tubing pipe, through which the oil and gas would flow.

Crews would test the structural integrity of the well and confirm that the volumes of hydrocarbons were sufficient to ensure the well would produce for years to come. About a month later, the fracking crews would get started.

Semi symphony

Less than a mile from Eagles well, past scattered small farms, lay another drilling site, called Fighting Camels, after the mascot of North Carolina’s Campbell University. Here, fracking crews were already at work.

The fracking site presented a deafening symphony of diesel motors. Dozens of semi-trucks powered the equipment that pumps millions of gallons of a water, sand and chemical mixture into the wells at high pressure, and dozens more trucks moved on and off the site delivering the water, sand and chemicals needed to crack the shale rock and release oil and gas.

The shale revolution is widely credited to the innovation and determination of one man, the late George P. Mitchell, son of a Greek immigrant and founder of The Woodlands. Mitchell, after striking it rich in oil, spent 35 years stubbornly focused on developing the Barnett Shale near Dallas, a play known once the “Wildcatters Graveyard.”

Mitchell, however, persisted, eventually combining hydraulic fracturing with horizontal drilling to unlock the complex shale rock. Mitchell didn’t frack his first profitable well until 1998, but with that success, he sold his company four years later for more than $3 billion to Devon Energy of Oklahoma City.

The shale boom was soon underway, producing oil and gas from Texas to North Dakota and the Northeast. It placed the United States among the world’s biggest energy producers, roiling global markets and upending more than 40 years of geopolitics .

And along with oil and gas came large volumes of another petroleum product known as natural gas liquids.

Three primary components can come out of any successful well: crude oil, natural gas, which is essentially methane, and natural gas liquids, primarily ethane, butane and propane. Ethane is the most prevalent natural gas liquid, or NGL, and used solely as a feedstock for petrochemicals.

In oil-rich areas such as the Permian, the NGLs flow out of wells as liquids in the stream of crude. In shale plays containing mostly natural gas, such as the Haynesville, ethane comes out as a gas, which is later separated from the methane.

At the fracking site, Tucker Energy Services of McAlester, Okla., led the operations for XTO. Workers, dragging heavy cables and chains, wore closed-channel headsets so they could hear each other, even from a few feet away, over the roar of the truck engines and other equipment.

Nick Cregan, a fracking field engineer with Tucker, was cooling off in the operations trailer as he prepared for the next fracking stage, the section of well that would get pounded by the high-pressure water, sand and chemical slurry.

Cregan travels here from his home in Oklahoma, nearly 300 miles away. He works two weeks on, one week off, spending too many nights in San Augustine hotel rooms while leaving his wife and four children behind. But the money is too good to pass up.

“It can be challenging and it’s tough work,” Cregan said. “There’s a lot of family time you miss out on. It’s hardly ever in your backyard.”

Beginning with a bang

Fracking begins with a bang — literally. Small explosive charges are lowered into the well, beginning at a depth of 200 feet, and detonated to create the initial fractures in the steel casing and shale rock. Next, the mixture of water, chemicals and sand are pumped into the well at a rate of 4,500 gallons a minute.

The sand, known in the industry as proppant, keeps the tiny fissures open; the chemicals help oil and gas to flow more easily from shale reservoirs.

The first wells fracked in the Haynesville shale consumed about 2 million gallons of water and 2 million pounds of sand. They were fracked in fewer than 10 sections, or stages.

The Fighting Camels well consumed 22 million gallons of water, most from privately owned ponds, and 16 million pounds of sand. Fracking crews targeted 52 stages, each a 130-foot section of the well.

The fracking proceeded with the efficiency of a factory. The sand went into a mixer where it was combined with water. Fracking chemicals were added to help lubricate the well and improve the flow of the slurry and the resulting production.

The pumping trucks then forced the mixture into the well and through perforations created by the explosions, shattering the shale rock and releasing the gas. “It’s like an assembly line — the water, sand, pressure pumps and the well,” said Buddy Davis, the Tucker Energy Services manager overseeing the site.

The Fighting Camels well began producing two months later, the Eagles well three months after that. Some of the gas flowed into pipelines that fed into Exxon Mobil’s English Bay pipeline system. Along the way, a processing facility separated the gas, essentially methane, from the natural gas liquids.

From there, the stream of natural gas liquids was piped to Mont Belvieu, about 35 miles east of Houston, where the ethane was separated from any other natural gas liquids. But it wasn’t the final destination for these hydrocarbon molecules.

It’s just the beginning of a transformation that is changing the flow of international commerce. [email protected] twitter.com/jdblum23

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Houston Chronicle: Ethane’s sweet trek from Houston to Vietnam and back

Third in a series

Ethane’s sweet trek from Houston to Vietnam and back

Byproduct of Texas shale gas turns region into world supplier of plastics

Houston Chronicle: In petrochemical boom, ‘all roads lead to Baytown’

Second in a series

In petrochemical boom, ‘all roads lead to Baytown’

Natural gas liquids from shale fields processed, transformed into plastics

Houston Chronicle: How a molecule changed the Gulf Coast — and the world

First in a series

How a molecule changed the Gulf Coast — and the world

Ethane flowing from shale fields is triggering a petrochemical boom that’s reshaping markets

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