Marathon Oil’s settlement for polluting Native land includes a record fine

A major oil company is paying a major fine for years of polluting Native land. The Justice Department announced Thursday that it had secured a $241.5 million settlement from Marathon Oil for befouling the air of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota with methane from natural gas flaring.

“This historic settlement — the largest ever civil penalty for violations of the Clean Air Act at stationary sources — will ensure cleaner air for the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation and other communities in North Dakota, while holding Marathon accountable for its illegal pollution,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement accompanying the announcement.

The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, home to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara peoples, was formally established in 1870 by executive order. Its creation was part of a years-long process that was supposed to (and failed) to cease years of violence and settler incursions into Native land in the northern plains of what is now the United States.

High Country News reported in 2012 that, despite oil having been discovered on the territory in 1951, federal U.S. bureaucracy that strictly controls Native land made it difficult to access. That bureaucracy was whittled down ahead of the Bakken shale oil boom, which flooded money into the area where poverty even now is double the national rate. Those riches were very unequally distributed, leading to a great deal of conflict—and in some cases murder.

But that windfall came at a great environmental cost. One byproduct of natural gas drilling is “flaring,” when natural gas not captured by drilling operations is partially burned off and released into the atmosphere. In its announcement of the settlement, the Justice Department noted that methane, one of those gasses, is “a climate super-pollutant that is 25 times more potent in the near term than carbon dioxide.” Inside Climate News reported two years ago that as much as 240 billion cubic feet of natural gas was released on reservation land between 2012 and 2020.

Most of the settlement money isn’t being handed over in cash. Marathon told the government that it will spend $170 million to reduce emissions at its Fort Berthold operations. The company will be cutting a check for $64.5 million, which the Justice Department says is the largest-ever instance of such a fine.

Marathon Oil, which is in the middle of a $170 billion acquisition by ConocoPhillips, said in a securities filing that “we do not believe that the mitigation expenditures, penalties, and injunctive relief that resulted from this settlement will have a material adverse effect on either our business or operations or the previously announced Agreement and Plan of Merger with ConocoPhillips.”