DEP Investigates Potential Methane Migration

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.

April 30, 2012 | 2:00 PM

State regulators are investigating another potential case of methane migration in Susquehanna County. As the Times-Tribune reports, the Department of Environmental Protection is trying to determine whether methane made its way into water supplies just north of Dimock.

Regulators with the state Department of Environmental Protection emphasized that they have not determined the source of elevated methane discovered in two Susquehanna County water wells and whether it is caused by Marcellus Shale drilling or a natural occurrence of gas in the aquifer
One focus of the investigation is Cabot Oil & Gas Corp.’s Greenwood 1 well, where the company recently squeezed additional cement between steel barriers that are meant to seal off gas and fluids from the aquifer.