# Coming Soon: The Bridge to Nowhere

An episode of [Drilled](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1439735906), 17 Jun 2021, 3:55.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/pdrl.fm/3e5572/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/9a7ab5ee-ce11-48ff-a544-b3ec00ea9b1e/c1fa7741-7e6b-49ec-9a82-b3ec00f2b5ac/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f82f371-6316-4ea6-a108-b3ec00ea9b2d

Season 6 explores the natural gas industry in three parts, following he story of Formosa Plastics to explain the direct connection between the fracking boom and plastics surge. Formosa Plastics is a company so notorious for environmental violations that it moved operations abroad, to the American South, to capitlize on weaker regulations. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:00] Speaker 1: Petrochemicals has become a kind of mantra for the oil
[0:04] Speaker 1: industry that thank goodness for petro chemicals, because that's where
[0:07] Speaker 1: all the growth lies.
[0:19] Speaker 2: A few years ago, I started to see an explosion
[0:24] Speaker 2: in disposable plastic at restaurants, at my kids' school. It
[0:29] Speaker 2: was everywhere, and this was even before the pandemic brought
[0:33] Speaker 2: more and more of it into our lives. It seemed weird,
[0:39] Speaker 2: and it reminded me of what had happened with climate change,
[0:43] Speaker 2: where a big environmental problem really seemed like it was
[0:47] Speaker 2: being addressed, like people were turning their attention to solving it,
[0:52] Speaker 2: and then suddenly everything shifted. I wanted to know what
[0:57] Speaker 2: had happened, and when I looked into it, I found fracking.
[1:02] Speaker 1: With the fracking of gas, a lot of ethane and propane,
[1:05] Speaker 1: and they're considerably cheaper as a feedstock than oil. And
[1:12] Speaker 1: all these companies had the bright idea, well, let's turn
[1:14] Speaker 1: this ethane into plastic and then we can undercut our
[1:18] Speaker 1: competitors and we can make very high superprofits. That's basically
[1:23] Speaker 1: was the idea.
[1:24] Speaker 2: That was infuriating because I had also just discovered that fracking,
[1:29] Speaker 2: on top of creating a whole bunch of environmental problems.
[1:33] Speaker 2: Radioactive waste, polluted water had never even been profitable.
[1:39] Speaker 3: That's something that I think has actually been in emblematic
[1:42] Speaker 3: with the shale industry as a whole, that it's an
[1:44] Speaker 3: industry that's been phenomenally successful at producing oil and gas,
[1:50] Speaker 3: but has been terrible at producing cash.
[1:53] Speaker 2: Now it was fueling a plastics boom, bringing a whole
[1:56] Speaker 2: new host of environmental problems.
[1:59] Speaker 4: There's a big build out going on in the Gulf
[2:02] Speaker 4: Coast as well as in Appalasia, so using gas liquids
[2:06] Speaker 4: from fract gas and turning those into plastics and these
[2:09] Speaker 4: giant industrial cities.
[2:11] Speaker 5: Really the school shut down, there's no school.
[2:13] Speaker 2: Promosa is using the school for a training center now,
[2:18] Speaker 2: so it's Promosa's town. My community was suffering. People were
[2:21] Speaker 2: getting sick, my classmates. I've had several classmates die of
[2:26] Speaker 2: rare cancers.
[2:27] Speaker 3: We had no big health issues until the insist started
[2:31] Speaker 3: to come in.
[2:33] Speaker 2: But the fossil fuel industry is still pushing quote unquote
[2:37] Speaker 2: natural gas as a climate solution a bridge fuel.
[2:44] Speaker 5: Renewables are great, but we need natural gas too. That's
[2:48] Speaker 5: what we use now. So when the sun is down,
[2:50] Speaker 5: you have a backup.
[2:53] Speaker 2: You found just like your granddad.
[2:55] Speaker 5: Plus, emissions have gone down because natural gas is the
[2:59] Speaker 5: number one electricity, Grandma, American Energy is leading the world.
[3:05] Speaker 5: Natural gas equals a cleaner future.
[3:07] Speaker 2: And they're fighting like hell against various local and state
[3:11] Speaker 2: moves to electrify everything and get off of gas.
[3:16] Speaker 3: At the local level, they're trying to make it as
[3:19] Speaker 3: miserable as possible for locally elected officials to move forward
[3:24] Speaker 3: policy to restrict natural gas.
[3:26] Speaker 2: There's too much going on here for anyone's story, So
[3:29] Speaker 2: we're doing something a little different with this one. A
[3:32] Speaker 2: season in three parts looking at all sides of the
[3:36] Speaker 2: fossil gas industry. We're calling it the Bridge to Nowhere.
[3:41] Speaker 2: Part one is coming soon. Make sure you're subscribed to
[3:44] Speaker 2: Drilled wherever you get your podcasts so you won't miss it.

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