PTT Global Chemical, Thailand's state-owned chemical company, and Marubeni Corp., a Japanese trading and investment house, have chosen a site in the US state of Ohio, near Wheeling, West Virginia, for a jointly owned world-scale US petrochemicals site that would use natural gas liquids, in particular ethane, from the Marcellus and Utica shale gas fields.

The companies join Shell and Odebrecht in evaluating or finalizing sites for shale gas-fed production. However, none of the petrochemical players has actually committed to building the complexes, and no financial decisions are expected to be made in the current uncertainty over the direction of prices for traditional petrochemical feedstocks.

According to an announcement by the office of Ohio governor John Kasich, PTT Global and Marubeni have committed to planning and engineering over the next 12 to 16 months.

Shell continues to evaluate the Horsehead Corp. complex on the Ohio River in Pennsylvania as a location for a 1.5 million t/y world-scale ethane cracker and downstream plastics production facility. A start-up date of 2018 was originally envisaged.

Odebrecht has been studying a site near Parkersburg, West Virginia for a cracker to be built in cooperation with subsidiary Braskem, the Brazilian petrochemicals giant. However, Braskem's US chief executive Fernando Musa, said recently that the company would not build a US cracker to go on stream before 2020.