Proposed Shell Refinery Could Create 17,000 Jobs

• 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.

Another sign of natural gas drilling’s economic impact, which energy companies like to frame as the “Marcellus Multiplier”: a “huge” petrochemical refinery will likely be built in the northeastern United States soon, to help process natural gas.
The plant could create 17,000 jobs, according to this Associated Press story. Of course, it would also carry environmental and safety risk, as the report notes.

Shell Oil Co. is nearing a decision on where in the Appalachians to build a huge new petrochemical refinery – a project that could bring thousands of construction and production jobs and change the face of the region for decades.
The plans are driven by the vast natural gas reserves discovered in the Marcellus Shale, a deep formation that lies beneath New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and parts of other states.
The scale of the multibillion-dollar project is unlike anything seen for decades in the region, said David Hounshell, a professor of technology and social change at Carnegie Mellon University.
“I think it’s a radical shift,” Hounshell told the Associated Press. “The region has really focused, since the 1980s, on looking more towards a service economy.”

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