Marcellus Shale Coalition Expands Its Philadelphia Outreach Efforts

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.

August 15, 2012 | 4:20 PM

The Marcellus Shale Coalition has been focusing a lot of attention on Philadelphia lately. It launched a new website aimed specifically at answering “the greater Philadelphia area’s” questions about natural gas drilling, and has been conducting focus groups in the city. Now, the Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting the group has hired a new person to manage outreach in the Philadelphia area.

The Marcellus Shale Coalition, the natural gas industry trade group, is expanding its presence in Southeastern Pennsylvania by hiring Shari Williams, a former communications specialist at the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission and the wife of State Sen. Anthony H. Williams (D., Philadelphia).
Williams, who worked with the PUC for 17 years, led consumer education events on energy and utility issues in Eastern Pennsylvania. She will take on a new role with the shale coalition as outreach manager in the Philadelphia area, where the industry is stepping up efforts to address public apprehension with fracking, which takes place mostly in western and northern part of the state.

The hire comes about a month before the coalition’s annual “Shale Gas Insight” conference, which will be held September 20 and 21 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia.