This Oil Company Is Linked to 1,000 Pollution Incidents and Other Violations. Oklahoma Never Punished It.

Photo illustration by Jovelle Tamayo/ProPublica. Source images: Nick Oxford for ProPublica, courtesy of Mike Faulkner, and obtained in an open records request from the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. In June 2023, staff at an Oklahoma regulatory agency were fed up. The state isn’t known for cracking down on oil and gas companies for polluting the environment, but for over a year, the staff had been building a case to punish Citation Oil & Gas, one of the nation’s largest privately owned oil companies. About 30 miles north of the Texas border, toxic wastewater was gushing from the ground outside the small city of Ardmore.