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Hickory Bend Plant Dedicated, Execs Talk Expansion
NEW MIDDLETOWN, Ohio – The land Springfield Township Trustee Robert Orr stood on midday Monday was, not long ago, “kind of a swampy farmland property, a mixture of woods and farming,” he recalled. Some farmers commented that the land “wasn’t very good farmland anyway” so it might as well be put to industrial use.
Behind Orr, that industrial future is taking shape, as work continues to build Pennant Midstream’s new Hickory Bend processing plant. By year-end, dry and wet gas from the Utica shale will be piped here and separated for a variety of uses, from providing fuel for energy markets to producing feedstock for multiple industries.
“This plant is really an important investment for us,” remarked Chad Zamarin, chief operating officer of Pennant Midstream Midstream LLC and NiSource Midstream Services LLC. Pennant is a joint venture of NiSource Midstream and Harvest Pipeline Co., an affiliate of Hilcorp Energy Co.
“Ohio is the heart of our organization,” he emphasized, during an interview following the dedication of the plant (READ STORY). “We have over 2,000 employees in the state of Ohio. We’ve been in Ohio for over 100 years and so this is an opportunity for us to rebuild and reinvest in really the heart of where our company operates.”
Executives joined state and local leaders including Gov. John Kasich to dedicate the $375 million Hickory Bend processing plant and gathering system. The complex includes some 55 miles of 20- and 24-inch wet gas gathering pipeline facilities as well as the cryogenic natural gas processing plant now under construction. Once operational, the plant will have the capacity to process 200 million cubic feet per day of natural gas.
“We’ll drop the temperature of the gas to minus-150 degrees” for separation, said Buddy Daugherty, manager of the Hickory Bend plant.
The plant will separate dry natural gas from natural-gas liquids (NGLs). The dry gas will be transported for delivery to homes and business across the region, and the NGLs will be shipped through a new liquid pipeline for conversion into products such as butane, ethane and propane. Most of the liquids will be transported by way of a 12-inch, 38-mile NGL pipeline that will connect the Hickory Bend plant to the UEO Kensington facility in Columbiana County.
Ground was broken on the Pennant plant in June “and we’re looking at being online by the end of the year,” Daugherty said. The plant will require 12 full-time operators, who were selected from 300 resumes that were submitted initially. “We have everything from engineers who weren’t able to work in their field to people who were doing home-based businesses” before being hired, he said.
Construction of the plant required some 500 workers, about half of whom are members of Operating Engineers Local 66, reported Carlton Ingram, business representative for the local.
“They did the site work, they did the excavation for the pipeline as well as for the plant itself, the heavy lifting and the material handling here, foundation, excavation,” Ingram said “They did a very good job.” Trades represented on the job included laborers, carpenters, pipefitters and welders, cement finishers and iron workers.
The plant is part of upwards of $5 billion in investment by the oil and gas industry in the 32 counties of eastern and northeastern Ohio, said Jason Wilson, director of the Governor’s Office of Appalachia. “People in Appalachia throughout Ohio just want an opportunity to go to work, to earn a fair wage, to raise our families and enjoy the American dream. This is an example of how that works,” he remarked. “There’s millions of dollars spent here that goes throughout the economy here in Mahoning County and through Ohio.”
“It’s not just the construction people here that’s working, “Daugherty said. “We’re putting more people to work. Everybody here eats lunch. Everybody here buys gasoline.”
“We can tell our children and our grandchildren to come home and it’s long overdue,” Ingram said. “We’re getting a second chance here.”
Development officials hope to bring end users of the fuels and separated materials to the region. Once separated, the gases provide feedstock for the chemical and plastics industries along with others “we probably haven’t thought of yet,” Wilson said, coupling the raw materials with the region’s manufacturing background and new technologies such as additive manufacturing, Wilson said. “This is the future of where energy is and where manufacturing begins,” he said.
The Hickory Bend plant is being built with future expansion in mind, said Pennant CEO Zamarin. “We built this property for the potential of three plants when we’re done expanding at this footprint. So over the next three to five years we expect to continue to build pipelines to this facility.”
Timing for those expansions will largely be based on the pace of production, Zamarin explained. “Everything that we’ve seen so far keeps us hopeful and positive about the development of the Utica shale here in Ohio and in western Pennsylvania,” he said. “We believe we’ll see the plant fill up over the course of the next couple of years, and before this plant is full we want to have the next plant ready.”
The plant provided an opportunity for Scott Singer, an instrumentation and electrical technician, to find work closer to home. Singer, of Mt. Jackson, Pa., about 7 miles from the plant site, previously worked at a power plant. “This industry is just taking off,” he remarked.
But not everyone is happy about the gas processing plant. Protesting outside the fence were about two dozen ghoulishly clad protestors whose chants could occasionally be heard during the ceremony. As guests and media departed, the protestors, their ranks thinned to about half, moved down the road to across from the entrance gate on South State Line Road. There they displayed their signs and shouted slogans and the occasional taunt to those exiting the property.
“We’re out here because we’re concerned about the air emissions from this plant,” said Clay Graham, who lives on the North Side of Youngstown. “We’re also concerned that residents were not given notice about the plant being here and there’s a lot of people that live by the plant.”
Copyright 2013 by The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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