Pennsylvania Fighting To Host Ethane Cracker

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.

January 3, 2012 | 1:48 PM

Pennsylvania wants a cracker. An ethane cracker, that is. The Keystone State is currently doing its best to woo Shell to locate the plant, which converts “wet” natural gas into ethylene, in western Pennsylvania.
As the Post-Gazette reports, Pennsylvania is competing with Ohio and West Virginia for the plant:

HARRISBURG — State officials are engaged in a high-stakes but low-key battle to land a chemical plant that would make gas from the Marcellus Shale even more valuable.
Prefacing his comments by noting the confidentiality agreement that he and others have signed, Pennsylvania’s top economic development official confirmed that the state has been aggressively wooing several companies interested in locating an ethane cracker in Appalachia.
…In addition to new jobs created through building and running a cracker facility, there also would be new positions at the businesses that sprout up to use ethylene for manufacturing, said Department of Community and Economic Development Secretary C. Alan Walker.
“It would be like the equivalent of the steel industry,” Mr. Walker said in an interview. “It’s a whole new industry and the potential is there to create thousands and thousands of jobs.