EPA Settles With Ponca City Carbon Black Plant Owner Over Air Pollution

• Logan Layden
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  Logan Layden is a reporter and managing editor for StateImpact Oklahoma. He is a native of McAlester, Oklahoma and graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2009. Logan spent three years as a state capitol reporter and local host of All Things Considered for NPR member station KGOU in Norman and six years as a reporter with StateImpact from 2011 to 2017. Most recently, he was news director for McAlester Radio before returning to public radio in 2020.

David Gilkey / NPR

Photo of the Ponca City Continental Carbon plant from NPR's 2011 investigation Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities.

A settlement agreement announced Monday between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Continental Carbon will cost the Houston company nearly $100 million.

Continental owns plants in Texas, Alabama, and in Ponca City, Okla., that produce a powdery substance called carbon black, which is used in a variety of everyday items, including tires, plastic, printer ink.

The plants also produce air pollution, specifically, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and particulate matter, none of which is particularly good for the human body.

“The oxides of nitrogen are one of the key components for the formation of ozone,” EPA Air Enforcement Division Director Phillip Brooks tells StateImpact. “And ozone at ground level is fairly significant for public health because it’s very corrosive and it has an adverse impact on anyone who breathes it.”

Continental’s Ponca City plant was featured in NPR’s 2011 investigation Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities, which highlighted the plight of single mother Karen Howe and a town covered in black dust:

Carbon black is like talcum powder. It spreads easily and far with even slight breezes.

“I can put a tablespoon of carbon black powder in a 40-by-40 room and just blow it with an air conditioning vent, and it would literally coat everything in the room,” says Dennis Hetu, the company’s president. “It just goes everywhere.” But none of it is supposed to get beyond the fence.

Still, Howe and her neighbors lived for years with black powder tainting their homes, cars, lawns, pets and clothing.

Brooks tells StateImpact there are limits to how much the company can expand its capacity to produce carbon black, and that Continental was exceeding those limits in violation of the Clean Air Act.

The settlement will require Continental’s Ponca City plant to install control systems to reduce its nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions and stop using flares, among other pollution-limiting measures. The estimated cost for the upgrades at three carbon black plants in Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas is about $98 million.

There’s more. From the EPA’s website:

The proposed consent decree requires Continental to spend $550,000 on environmental mitigation projects. No less than $200,000 will be spent at each of the Ponca City, Oklahoma, and Phenix City, Alabama facilities …

In addition, no less than $25,000 will be spent in each community surrounding each of its facilities, on various energy savings projects that also have criteria pollutant reduction benefits.

And the EPA isn’t done:

… Continental will pay a total of $650,000 in civil penalties.

This settlement is the result of discussions that began seven years ago, in 2008, with Oklahoma as one of the states pushing for a crack down on the carbon black plant in Ponca City. Despite the state’s hostility toward the EPA since Scott Pruitt took over as attorney general, Brooks says Oklahoma has remained a loyal partner when it comes to carbon black.