A major oil company has agreed to pay a substantial fine for years of polluting Native land. The Justice Department announced Thursday that Marathon Oil will pay a $241.5 million settlement for contaminating the air on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota through methane emissions from natural gas flaring.
According to Attorney General Merrick Garland, this historic settlement, the largest ever for Clean Air Act violations at stationary sources, aims to provide cleaner air for the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation and other North Dakota communities while holding Marathon accountable for its pollution.
The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, established in 1870 by executive order, is home to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara peoples. The area has a long history of conflict and settler incursions, exacerbated by the discovery of oil on the territory in 1951. Federal bureaucracy previously restricted access to the oil, but these controls were reduced ahead of the Bakken shale oil boom. This economic surge brought wealth to the area but deepened poverty and conflicts.
The environmental cost of this oil boom has been significant due to the practice of flaring, where natural gas not captured during drilling is burned off and released into the atmosphere. Methane, a potent greenhouse gas 25 times more impactful than carbon dioxide, is a major component of these emissions. Between 2012 and 2020, as much as 240 billion cubic feet of natural gas was released on reservation land.
Most of the settlement funds will be allocated to reducing emissions at Marathon’s Fort Berthold operations, with the company committing $170 million to these efforts. Marathon will also pay a $64.5 million fine, the largest of its kind.
Despite this considerable settlement, Marathon Oil, currently in a $170 billion acquisition process by ConocoPhillips, stated in a securities filing that it does not expect the mitigation expenditures, penalties, and injunctive relief from this settlement to have a material adverse effect on its business, operations, or the merger agreement with ConocoPhillips.