More Details On Shell's Cracker Decision

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.

March 15, 2012 | 12:51 PM

The AP adds more details to a story first reported by StateImpact Pennsylvania: Shell has chosen a Pennsylvania site to build its multi-billion dollar ethane cracker.
The cracker will go to Monaca, Beaver County, according to the AP’s interview with a Shell executive:

Dan Carlson, Shell’s General Manager of New Business Development, said Thursday that the company signed a land option agreement with Horsehead Corp. to evaluate a site near Monaca, about 35 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.
Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania had all sought the plant and offered Shell major tax incentives. Monaca is just 20 miles from both the Ohio and West Virginia borders, so workers in all three states are likely to benefit.
But Shell said the Monaca site, currently home to Horsehead’s zinc factory, had the mix of resource and transportation attributes “to accommodate facilities for a world scale petrochemical complex and potential future expansions.”