Is Ohio Still Wooing Shell? Governor's Office Won't Say

• Scott Detrow
  BioRecent Stories

  

  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.

Last week we told you that despite Governor Corbett’s warnings, West Virginia says it is not trying to re-enter the Shell ethane cracker bidding war. A spokesman for Governor Earl Ray Tomblin’s office told the Charleston Daily Mail that they had “not had any fur­ther dis­cus­sions with Shell about their cracker loca­tion since the announce­ment that they had optioned prop­erty in Penn­syl­va­nia.”
Ohio is playing it a bit more coy. Here’s what Laura Jones, a spokeswoman for Ohio Governor John Kasich’s office, told StateImpact Pennsylvania via email: “Our policy is not to discuss details of individual projects, active or otherwise. What I can tell you is that we are aggressively marketing sites in Ohio to the chemical and petrochemical processing and fractionation companies. The state of Ohio is well located for those opportunities and we have much to offer those sectors.”
The Corbett Administration is warning another state could swoop in and steal the Shell plant from Pennsylvania, if legislators don’t pass a $1.65 billion tax break.
But as the Tribune-Review reported this weekend, administration claims that a petrochemical plant would produce 20,000 permanent jobs are not grounded in detailed studies. 

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