Petrochemicals has become a kind of mantra for the oil industry that thank goodness for petro chemicals, because that's where all the growth lies.
A few years ago, I started to see an explosion in disposable plastic at restaurants, at my kids' school. It was everywhere, and this was even before the pandemic brought more and more of it into our lives. It seemed weird, and it reminded me of what had happened with climate change, where a big environmental problem really seemed like it was being addressed, like people were turning their attention to solving it,
and then suddenly everything shifted. I wanted to know what had happened, and when I looked into it, I found fracking.
With the fracking of gas, a lot of ethane and propane, and they're considerably cheaper as a feedstock than oil. And all these companies had the bright idea, well, let's turn this ethane into plastic and then we can undercut our competitors and we can make very high superprofits. That's basically was the idea.
That was infuriating because I had also just discovered that fracking, on top of creating a whole bunch of environmental problems. Radioactive waste, polluted water had never even been profitable.
That's something that I think has actually been in emblematic with the shale industry as a whole, that it's an industry that's been phenomenally successful at producing oil and gas, but has been terrible at producing cash.
Now it was fueling a plastics boom, bringing a whole new host of environmental problems.
There's a big build out going on in the Gulf Coast as well as in Appalasia, so using gas liquids from fract gas and turning those into plastics and these giant industrial cities.
Really the school shut down, there's no school.
Promosa is using the school for a training center now, so it's Promosa's town. My community was suffering. People were getting sick, my classmates. I've had several classmates die of rare cancers.
We had no big health issues until the insist started to come in.
But the fossil fuel industry is still pushing quote unquote natural gas as a climate solution a bridge fuel.
Renewables are great, but we need natural gas too. That's what we use now. So when the sun is down, you have a backup.
You found just like your granddad.
Plus, emissions have gone down because natural gas is the number one electricity, Grandma, American Energy is leading the world. Natural gas equals a cleaner future.
And they're fighting like hell against various local and state moves to electrify everything and get off of gas.
At the local level, they're trying to make it as miserable as possible for locally elected officials to move forward policy to restrict natural gas.
There's too much going on here for anyone's story, So we're doing something a little different with this one. A season in three parts looking at all sides of the fossil gas industry. We're calling it the Bridge to Nowhere. Part one is coming soon. Make sure you're subscribed to Drilled wherever you get your podcasts so you won't miss it.