Chevron Invests In Marcellus Drilling

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.

March 12, 2012 | 4:00 PM

Scott Detrow / StateImpact Pennsylvania

A Susquehanna County drilling rig

Record-low natural gas prices have led Chesapeake, Consol and other energy companies to scale back their operations in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale formation, but Chevron is doing the opposite.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, the company is “playing catch-up” and expanding its Marcellus Shale efforts:

Chevron, a relative newcomer to shale oil and gas production, is playing catch-up in a fast-paced competition against other energy giants to ride the latest industry boom. It only entered the Marcellus Shale—which lies beneath several Northeastern states and has become one of the most prolific sources of natural gas in the U.S.—a year ago when it acquired Atlas Energy Inc. and other properties in the region for about $4 billion.
Its decision to keep gas production churning high, despite the current low prices, is sure to be a hot topic Tuesday when Chevron holds its annual analysts’ meeting in New York.

The paper says Chevron operates about 100 Marcellus wells right now, and plans on doubling that figure.