PORTLAND, Texas — That $7 billion Exxon plant under construction in Portland, Texas, is fast approaching completion. 3News got an exclusive tour of that facility Monday as crews there work to finish this huge plastics plant.
"They are not training anymore. We are in the process of starting up our utilities," said Paul Fritsch, plant manager for Gulf Coast Growth Ventures.
The facility still has some 4,500 construction workers on site, busy getting ready to bring more of the plant online.
"Our plan is to bring the rest of the plant up in the fourth quarter of this year, which is starting to get to be a really exciting time for us here at the plant," Fritsch said.
3News took a tour of the rest of the administration building and then hopped into a van for a look around a facility being built on top of an old cotton farm.
"These eight furnaces, they called it steam cracking. It’s really a hydrolysis reactor, a chemical engineering term for it," Fritsch said.
The steam cracking unit starts the process of turning ethane gas into products that we use everyday, like polyester for clothing and plastic for water bottles.
"We are an ethane steam cracker, which then makes ethylene, and then we take that ethylene and we produce two products," Fritsch said. "One of them is monoethylene glycol the other polyethylene."
The facility, which is located on a 1,300 acre site, is going to employee some 600 employees when all of the work is completed on the modular built plant. It will be the largest ethylene cracker plant in the world, and as of Monday it was about 95-percent complete.