School District Nets $628,000 From Drilling Lease

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 22, 2011 | 2:18 PM

A natural gas lease will yield more than a half million dollars for one western Pennsylvania school district, according to the AP:

A Pittsburgh-area school district has finalized a lease agreement with a gas drilling company and received $628,000 up front.
The Valley News Dispatch reported Wednesday that Phillips Exploration’s lease with the South Butler School District also carries an 18 percent royalty from any gas that is produced and sold from the acreage.
Phillips Exploration is owned by Texas-based XTO Energy, which is owned by ExxonMobil.
The newspaper reported (http://bit.ly/tNn0PJ ) that the lease requires district officials to approve the site of any well before Phillips drills, and any well or pipeline must be at least 500 feet from a district structure.
The school board approved the five-year lease with a 6-2 vote in September. It covers about 165 acres the district owns.