West Virginia "Has Not Had Any Further Discussions" About Cracker With Shell

• 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.

Are West Virginia and Ohio still trying to persuade Shell to build its ethane cracker in either of their states, instead of Beaver County?
As the Corbett Administration has pushed for a $1.65 billion tax credit, that’s one of the concerns the governor and his cabinet secretaries have raised. “I can tell you from what I hear – I can’t even attribute it to anybody because it’s passed along secondhand – that Ohio is still trying to lure that away, as is West Virginia,” Corbett said on Tuesday.
But West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin’s office denies the claim. Here’s what a spokeswoman for the Democrat told the Charleston Daily Mail:

“The West Virginia Development Office has not had any further discussions with Shell about their cracker location since the announcement that they had optioned property in Pennsylvania. …Obviously if Shell decides that the site they optioned in Pennsylvania will not work for whatever reason, West Virginia would be happy to reopen our discussions, however we respect Shell’s decision and have now turned our attention to our negotiations with other companies that are still considering West Virginia as a potential site for an ethane cracker.”

StateImpact Pennsylvania has contacted Ohio Governor John Kasich’s office, as well, and will update this post if and when we hear back from the Republican.

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