Impact Fee Provides Money For 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.

February 8, 2012 | 10:53 AM

During yesterday’s budget address, Governor Corbett said his administration is “hard at work to bring a major natural gas processing plant to southwestern Pennsylvania.”
The natural gas impact fee in front of the House would help Corbett woo Shell, which is deciding whether to build an ethane cracker in Pennsylvania, Ohio or West Virginia.
As the Beaver County Times reports, the legislation “would steer 5 percent of revenue from drilling fees to the state Department of Community and Economic Development for…infrastructure projects related to the natural gas industry, such as the establishment of a petrochemical plant.”
Pittsburgh’s KDKA aired a report on the hunt for the ethane cracker earlier this week. Watch it after the jump.