Greenwire: 40 Percent Of State-Level Drilling Regulators Are Tied To Industry

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.

December 19, 2011 | 4:53 PM

Kim Paynter / WHYY

A drill site looms above a cow pasture in north central Pennsylvania.

A Greenwire investigation found four in ten state drilling regulators across the country holds ties to the energy industry:

[In Arkansas,] five of the nine members of the appointed commission have their own drilling companies.Two others are officers of oil and gas companies.
Such ties are common among oil and gas officials, according to review of state records and other documents by Greenwire.
More than 40 percent of officials regulating oil and gas production in the top drilling states, records show, come from the industry they are charged with policing.
It is a degree of self-regulation enjoyed by few other industries, if any. And it heightens suspicion among critics of the nation’s drilling boom that companies are allowed to damage the environment with impunity.

Deputy Environmental Protection Secretary Scott Perry, who heads the DEP’s Bureau of Oil and Gas Management, does not have any industry ties.