Casey Asks Shell To Build Ethane "Cracker" In Pennsylvania

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.

January 11, 2012 | 5:52 PM

Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Casey is the latest Pennsylvania official to lobby Shell to build an ethane cracker within the commonwealth.
The plant converts “wet” natural gas into ethylene, and could create thousands of jobs in Western Pennsylvania. Ohio and West Virginia are vying for the plant, too, and Shell will likely decide a location within the next few months.
Here’s the AP’s story on the letter Casey wrote to the energy giant:

U.S. Sen. Bob Casey on Wednesday wrote to a Shell executive in hopes of persuading the oil and gas giant to choose a Pennsylvania site to build a huge new chemical plant that could mean thousands of new jobs and millions of tax dollars for the state.
The company has said it will decide early this year where to build the plant from among sites in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, and those states’ officials have lobbied Shell or offered incentives for what could be a massive investment that rivals the region’s largest industrial plants.
“Pennsylvania has everything needed to make it a top choice for Shell’s facilities,” Casey wrote in his letter to Shell executive Mark Quartermain. “We have a proven work force, access to water, communities with a long history of working cooperatively with industry, an extensive rail transportation network and appropriate real estate. Pennsylvania also has an exceptional higher education network which will mesh well with Shell’s commitment to innovation.”

What, exactly, is a cracker? Columbus public radio station WOSU does a great job of explaining.