Corbett Wooed And Googled To Win 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.

The Corbett Administration played its cards close as it pitched Shell on building an ethane cracker in western Pennsylvania. During a press conference this afternoon, we learned more details of how involved Governor Corbett became in the bid.
The Post-Gazette reports Corbett held “four or five” meetings with Shell’s CEO. Corbett even did some googling: “I know that we were in competition with West Virginia and Ohio. I would spend hours at the governor’s residence in my library on my computer on Google Map, pulling up the Ohio River the whole way, and saying where are the best facilities, not even knowing what they were, just looking for open areas. I kept coming back to the facility that was selected,” he told reporters.

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