Texas Tries To Fend Off Pennsylvania's Energy Push

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

November 22, 2011 | 12:21 PM

Governor Corbett has made it clear he wants to make Pennsylvania the “Texas of natural gas drilling.” By that, he means the central hub where energy companies are headquartered.
How do they feel about this plan in The “Texas of oil”? (That would be..the actual Texas.)
Our partners at StateImpact Texas looked into it:

In Houston, where the business boosters count 3,600 local companies doing energy-related work, the title “World’s Energy Capital” is taken very seriously. And not just because of pride or profit.
“If you begin to lose the concentration in Houston as the Energy Capital, you start getting into, in my opinion, national security issues,” said Lane Sloan,a former long-time top executive with Shell.
He heads a committee with the Greater Houston Partnership with the goal of “perpetuating Houston as the Energy Capital of the World”. Sloan sees Beijing or Shanghai as the biggest threats to Houston’s position as China’s living standards rise and create new and enormous demand for fuel.
“It’s not going to the East Coast or the West Coast (of the United States). It’s going somewhere else in the world,” said Sloan of the Capital title. Losing the title would weaken the United States’ position in a world where energy and influence go hand in hand.