MOSCOW (MRC) -- The American Chemistry Council (ACC) Foundation has provided a USD1 million grant to Harris County, Texas, which will use the funds to purchase air monitoring equipment for its Community Air Monitoring Program (CAMP), reported Chemweek.
Harris County will also use the grant to obtain independent scientific support from Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), including analysis and modelling of air quality data. To help with the analysis, HARC has been supplied with 30 years of private industry air monitoring data.
Harris County says the collaboration will help address emergency response issues identified by a gap analysis following chemical plant incidents in 2019. The county, which has a very heavy chemical industry presence, includes the municipalities of Houston, Deer Park, Galena Park, La Porte, Morgan’s Point, Pasadena, and portions of Baytown and The Woodlands.
“(W)e appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this groundbreaking initiative, which will help protect workers and communities throughout the Houston region,” says Chris Jahn, president and CEO of ACC. “One of the project’s important strengths is that in addition to providing local officials with an array of new air monitoring equipment, it also allows officials to draw on the scientific expertise of HARC. It’s a tremendous team effort that will greatly improve the county’s ability to collect, analyze and share information about air quality, especially during an emergency.”
As MRC informed previously, Royal Dutch Shell has reported an outage at its olefins plant in Deer Park, Texas, on 5 January, 2021. The plant flared for 16 hours following unspecified process upset. Maximum steam cracker operating rate in Texas falls to 89%.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing PE and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's DataScope report, PE imports to Russia decreased in January-November 2020 by 17% year on year and reached 569,900 tonnes. High density polyethylene (HDPE) accounted for the greatest reduction in imports. At the same time, PP imports into Russia increased by 21% year on year to about 202,000 tonnes in the first eleven months of 2020. Propylene homopolymer (homopolymer PP) accounted for the main increase in imports.
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