Mewbourne Oil Company has agreed to pay a $5.5 million penalty to settle a civil complaint regarding pollution violations, the USA Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said Tuesday.
Under the settlement, Mewbourne is also required to complete projects expected to cost at least $4.6 million to ensure 422 of its oil and gas well pads in New Mexico and Texas comply with state and federal clean air regulations and offset past illegal emissions, the EPA said in a news release.
The civil complaint, filed jointly by the EPA and the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), alleges that Mewbourne failed to obtain required state and federal permits, to capture and control air emissions from storage vessels, and to comply with inspection, monitoring and recordkeeping requirements at more than 100 of its oil and gas operations in New Mexico and Texas. The EPA and the NMED identified the alleged violations through field investigations and repeated flyover surveillance conducted in 2019, 2020, and 2022, the news release said.
“Today’s settlement will eliminate 11,000 tons of harmful air pollutants annually and ensure that Mewbourne complies with the Clean Air Act”, said Larry Starfield, principal deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. “The result will be cleaner, healthier air for communities in New Mexico and Texas.”
“Good air quality is essential to the health of our communities, and we need to ensure that oil and gas facilities are properly designed, maintained, and monitored in order to meet national standards”, Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division Todd Kim said. “We will continue to work to improve air quality and public health, including holding oil and gas production operations, like Mewbourne, accountable for their violations of federal and state law.”
“Compliance with air quality regulations is essential to ensure the health of our people and the protection of our environment”, NMED Cabinet Secretary James Kenney said. “We will continue to conduct oil and gas investigations and aggressively enforce violations.”
Mewbourne will spend at least $3.6 million to implement extensive design, operation, maintenance, and monitoring improvements, including by installing new tank pressure monitoring systems that will provide advance notification of potential emissions and allow for immediate response action by the company, the EPA said.
Mewbourne will also spend at least $1 million to offset the harm caused by the alleged violations by replacing over 2,000 pollutant-emitting pneumatic devices with non-emitting devices on an “accelerated schedule”, the EPA said, adding that this will reduce volatile organic compound emissions over 15 years by approximately 4,500 tons beyond that required by existing regulation.
During the timeframes of Mewbourne’s alleged violations, air quality monitors in the relevant counties in New Mexico registered rising ozone concentrations exceeding 95 percent of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, in violation of the Clean Air Act, the news release said.
New Mexico’s portion of the fines will be channeled to the state’s general fund, according to the release.
Texas-based Mewbourne is an independent oil and gas producer engaged in the exploration, development, production, and acquisition of oil and natural gas resources in the USA. The company focuses on the Anadarko and Permian Basins of Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico and currently operates over 2,100 wells, according to the company website.
According to a list compiled by Enervus Intelligence Research in May, Mewbourne is the third most prolific private oil and gas producer in the USA. The list was topped by Continental Resources.
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