Pennsylvania’s gas & energy politics

Hour 1

Energy issues continue to connect Pennsylvania politics to the global economy, and on today’s Radio Times, we’re going to catch up on several important recent developments and what they mean for our region, our wallets, and our outlook for the future. Last week, the Carlyle Group finalized a joint venture with Sunoco to save and expand Sunoco’s South Philadelphia refinery, the biggest on the East Coast, partly designed to capture natural gas being fracked out of the Marcellus Shale deposit under a wide swath of Pennsylvania. That same impetus is bringing another huge petrochemical company, Royal Dutch Shell, to Beaver County in southwestern Pennsylvania to build an ethane cracker plant using fracked natural gas. The so-called “cracker credit” of tax subsidies was the Corbett administration’s top priority in the just completed budget process. Also tucked into that budget was a moratorium on drilling in the heretofore overlooked South Newark Basin in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Joining us to explain these developments and more is SCOTT DETROW, Harrisburg reporter for StateImpactPA, a col­lab­o­ra­tion between WITF, WHYY and NPR covering the fis­cal and envi­ron­men­tal impact of Pennsylvania’s boom­ing energy econ­omy, with a focus on Mar­cel­lus Shale drilling. We’ll also hear from LIAM DENNING, an editor and writer for the Heard on the Street page in the Money & Investing section of The Wall Street Journal, about how these developments factor into the domestic energy sector and the global economy.

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[audio: 070912_100630.mp3]