Report: Ethane Cracker Will Land In Ohio

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 12, 2012 | 1:13 PM

CLARIFICATION: As several readers have pointed out, this article doesn’t clearly explain who these “experts” are, and whether they’re simply predicting the cracker will end up in Ohio, or sharing inside information. So, take this with a grain of salt, as one of many articles we’re linking to on the cracker topic. When new information becomes available, we’ll post it on the site. -Scott Detrow
Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia are in the midst of a bidding war for an ethane cracker – a large plant that converts natural gas into ethylene, and would likely create thousands of jobs.
According to a report in Ohio’s Youngstown News, Pennsylvania has fallen short, and Shell will build the cracker in Ohio:

Though the Mahoning Valley is out of the running for a $2 billion economic investment, it appears that project is primed to stay in the Buckeye State.
Southeast Ohio is expected to be the destination for a new $2 billion Shell Chemical plant related to drilling in the Utica and Marcellus shales, experts told The Vindicator on Wednesday.
In June, Shell announced the plan for a cracker, which breaks down large molecules from oil and natural gas into smaller ones.
The cracker would process ethane from natural gas to produce ethylene, one of the primary building blocks for petrochemicals, Shell said.

The story doesn’t make it clear whether state officials or Shell employees are the “experts” pegging Ohio as the winner. We’ll update the website if any new details emerge.