Shale Gas Reshapes U.S. Plastics Industry

Susan Phillips

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Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

November 16, 2012 | 6:18 PM

A woman shops for milk in a Chicago grocery store. Natural gas is an essential raw ingredient for plastics, like these milk bottles.

Pennsylvania’s abundance of Marcellus Shale gas has helped drive down the price of natural gas to all-time lows. That’s bad news for drillers, but good news for their customers. And one of the main consumers of natural gas in the U.S is the petrochemical industry. Shale gas has been a boon for the folks who manufacture plastics and plastic products. George Biltz spent three decades in the chemical and manufacturing industries. Biltz is vice president of energy and climate change for Dow Chemical. I began the conversation by asking him how natural gas is used as a raw material, or “feedstock,” for all kinds of products.