The Shell Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex is pictured in Monaca, Pa., on Dec. 12, 2019.Maddie McGarvey/The New York Times News Service
Royal Dutch Shell’s multi-billion-dollar petrochemicals complex now under construction near Pittsburgh looms over the U.S. presidential race in Pennsylvania like the proverbial elephant in the room in the Rust Belt state that could decide the election.
The plant will use shale gas from the nearby Marcellus and Utica basins to churn out plastics used in everything from food packaging to auto parts. It will create thousands of direct and indirect jobs and help revive hollowed-out communities across the region.
The project is a symbol of economic renewal in a region still recovering from the decline of its traditional manufacturing industries. But it also represents a big bet on fossil fuels at a time when climate change has moved to the political forefront.
How voters in Pennsylvania come down on that issue could determine whether Republican President Donald Trump keeps his job in November. The state had been reliably Democratic for two decades before Mr. Trump carried it by 44,000 votes in 2016. He is banking on his support for hydraulic fracturing to keep it in his column this time.
Mr. Trump keeps insisting Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would slap a ban on fracking, the controversial procedure used to extract oil and natural gas that has turned the United States into an energy superpower over the past decade. And though Mr. Biden has repeatedly denied he would ban fracking, he has been dogged by his previous waffling on the issue and his own base’s hostility toward fossil fuels.
After all, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, whose Green New Deal includes a fracking ban, has been calling the shots of late. Democratic vice-presidential nominee, California Senator Kamala Harris, has been a vocal supporter of a fracking ban, as was almost every other candidate that ran against Mr. Biden for the nomination.
Mr. Biden is haunted by the “no new fracking” comment he made during a primary debate in March. The Biden campaign insists its candidate was referring to his pledge to ban new permits for oil and gas drilling on federal lands when he made that comment. It would not affect fracking in Pennsylvania, which is on private land.
That may not be enough for Pennsylvania voters who see fracking as the best thing that has happened to the Rust Belt in decades. They know they have a friend in Mr. Trump. They remain wary of what a Biden administration would mean for their state’s economy.
“Fracking has to continue because we need a transition,” Mr. Biden said last week during a town hall event on CNN. “We’re going to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, and we’ll get to net-zero power emissions by 2035. But there’s no rationale to eliminate, right now, fracking.”
Mr. Trump seized on that comment at a rally this week in an aircraft hangar at the Pittsburgh airport. “All of a sudden, he said maybe we’ll have some fracking,” the President said, but adding, “The radical left won’t let him get away with it.”
That remark encapsulates for many swing voters the dilemma they face in this campaign. Even voters disgusted with Mr. Trump may worry that Mr. Biden would be unable to resist calls from his party’s progressive wing for action on climate change that they fear would hurt the economy. Nowhere does that fear seem as palpable as in Pennsylvania, whose 20 electoral votes could determine the outcome in a close election.
The political debate over fracking in Pennsylvania has been fed by a U.S. Chamber of Commerce study, published in May, that projected that an outright ban would cost more than 600,000 jobs and reduce annual economic output in the state by US$84-billion. It said Shell’s polyethylene plant near Pittsburgh is the first such facility to be built outside the U.S. Gulf of Mexico coast in decades and is “expected to attract additional manufacturing facilities looking to locate close to feedstock production.”
Mr. Biden retains an average lead of about five percentage points over Mr. Trump in state polls of registered voters. But that is down from the nearly double-digit lead the Democratic presidential nominee held in Pennsylvania two months ago. Mr. Biden will need to rack up big gains in the Philadelphia suburbs in the November vote to compensate for Mr. Trump’s huge lead among white working-class voters elsewhere in the state.
Mr. Biden was born in Pennsylvania and was considered a champion of working-class voters during his 36-year career as U.S. senator representing Delaware. But he has hewed to the left during this campaign as he seeks to mobilize a Democratic base that has shifted from the white working-class to millennial and minority voters.
As the fracking issue demonstrates, it’s been a tough balancing act for Mr. Biden. And it may just end up costing him Pennsylvania.
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