AUGUST 2025
When President Trump signed the “big beautiful” spending bill into law on July 4th, it included a provision officially scuttling the nation’s methane waste emissions fee for the next 10 years.
This (overwhelmingly popular) policy was designed to affect only the worst performers in the oil and gas industry, encouraging them to instead avoid the charge by improving their air emissions performance to industry best practices. But since the excessive pollution fee is now scrapped, this month’s polluter of the month award is dedicated to Hilcorp Energy, a company whose trade association allegedly helped lead efforts to end the methane emission penalties.
Hilcorp has the distinction of continuing to rank as the #1 methane polluter in the U.S. oil and gas industry while its excessive pollution incidents have generated headlines from New Mexico to Alaska to Ohio. In 2024 alone, the company agreed to pay a penalty of almost $10 million for allegedly failing to curb emissions from its operations in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, including on Jicarilla Apache and Navajo Nation lands, and separately agreed to $1.275 million penalty to resolve allegations the company unlawfully dumped volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and methane from its oil and gas production operations in western Pennsylvania.
Pollution from oil and gas activities carries real human impact for nearby communities. In New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, where Hilcorp is the largest operator and nearly 80% of the population lives within a ½-mile radius of active oil and gas operations, recent reporting details how kids in the area “just keep getting sick”.
Hilcorp claims it is “committed to reducing emissions” from its operations and has a “demonstrated track record of achieving such improvements”… then why was it supporting the elimination of the methane waste fee?
Stats
- A mountain of pollution evidence. Over the last several years, experts from Earthworks have compiled video evidence identifying otherwise hidden pollution from over 100 Hilcorp oil and gas facilities.
- Pollution events large enough to be visible from space. Hilcorp has been identified as the source for at least 55 methane plumes captured in Carbon Mapper’s data portal, according to analysis from Global Energy Monitor’s most recent release of their Global Methane Emitters Tracker.
While these plumes attributed to Hilcorp were first observed in 2022, a pollution event at Hilcorp’s San Juan Gas Plant on May 27, 2025, was captured by Carbon Mapper’s Tanager-1 Satellite dumping methane into the air at a rate of 462 kilograms per hour. Pollution at this rate is over four times the threshold the US Environmental Protection Agency uses to define a methane super-emitter event, a this facility, located in Bloomfield, NM, is only 3/4 of a mile from the city’s Naaba Ani as well as Rio Vista elementary schools. - Dozens of fines, millions in penalties. Just since 2020, Hilcorp has incurred $23,920,612 in penalties for 25 environment-related offenses, according to Violation Tracker data.
- The methane waste continues. In New Mexico alone, Hilcorp reports losing 188,457 mcf of methane gas to venting or flaring in the first half of 2025 (data as of July 31st; and note this data is self-reported).