Pennsylania Adds Disclaimer To Its Drilling Database

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.

November 13, 2012 | 2:02 PM

Three months after Pennsylvania’s top natural gas producer, Chesapeake, submitted an error-filled production report to the Department of Environmental Protection, the state has added a disclaimer to the website where it hosts drilling data.
More from the AP:

The agency now tells visitors to the website that it can’t guarantee the “accuracy, completeness or timeliness” of production data that companies submit.
The change came after several experts in the oil and gas industry criticized DEP in August for not clearly telling the public that one of the state’s largest natural gas producers submitted unusable data for a biannual report. As a result, the statewide production totals at first appeared to be far lower than they actually were.
A DEP spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about the change.