Big Chinese tankers help US export ethane

Shanghai

THE US shale boom's latest reverberations are being felt at a shipyard on the Yangtze River in eastern China.

It's there that Sinopacific Offshore & Engineering Co unveiled last month a so-called dragon-class tanker to carry US hydrocarbons to Europe. The 180-metre-long vessels will move ethane piped from American shale fields to a Pennsylvania terminal, across the Atlantic to Norway and Scotland, where Ineos Group Holdings SA will process the natural gas liquid into chemicals used to make plastics.