Shell Oil just announced they are building a multi-billion-dollar ethylene cracking plant a couple a miles down the road from my place.  Awesome news, this will create hundreds of jobs as well as put all the Marcellus Shale "wet gas"  to work for us in Pennsylvania.  8)

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/16/148702640/shell-picks-pittsburgh-area-for-major-refinery

I am not looking for a job (I already have a good one) but this will be great for the local job market.  :)

"Actual construction is still years away." 

"Actual construction is still years away."


No problemo. This gives the local schools enuf time to get some appropriate skills taught to the local workforce. Chemistry, welding, that sort of thing.

The local area has lots of decent sites for other businesses (related to the cracker plant) to locate, too.  Not a bad little boom coming to the Beaver Valley over the next couple of years.

Locals know the small area as "Kobuta", named after a chemical plant built during WW2 to make butadiene that was essential for the war effort as it was a key ingredient in making synthetic rubber.  20,000 jobs were created during the construction of that plant, which still operates to this day (next door to where Shell will locate) as Nova Chemicals.  8)

Nova Chemicals.  8)

Would that be this Nova Chemicals?  IPIC WIN! 

Small world -- that was the only bet I made during the credit crunch that both made fundamental sense and actually made me some money.  Nova going bankrupt would have shuttered and scrapped a lot of bargain-basement assets that would have cost billions to rebuild, and tens of millions just to shut down and restart.  Abu Dhabi happened to have a bunch of cash, and the rest was a little footnote in Canadian business history.

Would that be this Nova Chemicals?  IPIC WIN! 

Small world -- that was the only bet I made during the credit crunch that both made fundamental sense and actually made me some money.  Nova going bankrupt would have shuttered and scrapped a lot of bargain-basement assets that would have cost billions to rebuild, and tens of millions just to shut down and restart.  Abu Dhabi happened to have a bunch of cash, and the rest was a little footnote in Canadian business history.


Yep, that's the place.  I drive past it every day.  :)

Yep, that's the place.  I drive past it every day.  :)


I AM THE buried harmlessly in the boring part of the top 25 PERCENT ;)

All kidding aside, it's nice to see a real win out of that trade.  Letters and numbers on a screen are all well and good, but it's seriously gratifying to know that in some microscopic way, I was a part of "the system actually working the way it's supposed to, for once."

There was never anything wrong with Nova Chemicals as a business, it was just really crappy timing and bad luck that they had to refinance their debt during the middle of a crash they had no part in creating, and the institutions on which they were reliant for capital were busy trying to stave off collapse, and in no condition to lend.