Exxon Mobil Slapped With $6.1 Million Fine

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Exxon Mobil Slapped With $6.1 Million Fine

WASHINGTON - Exxon Mobil Corp. has agreed to pay an additional $6.1 million penalty after it reneged on a promise to cut air pollution from four refineries in California, Louisiana and Texas, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

The payment stems from an agreement between the government and Exxon Mobil in 2005 - part of a broader push by the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce air pollution from refineries - in which the company agreed to pay $14.4 million in civil penalties and community-related environmental projects, while also installing new air pollution controls at the refineries.

But Justice and EPA officials said Wednesday that Exxon Mobil violated the agreement by not adequately reducing smokestack sulfur pollution at the refineries as it had promised to do.

Exxon Mobil said in a statement that the company identified the ongoing sulfur emission problem and brought the matter to the EPA's attention.

"Environmental impacts associated with this item were very minor," Prem Nair, a spokeswoman for Exxon Mobil's offices in Fairfax, Va., wrote in an e-mail. She said the emission problems have been corrected and the company now meets the required EPA standard at the refineries in Beaumont and Baytown, Texas, Torrance, and Baton Rouge, La.

But the Justice Department saw the matter as a bit more serious.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/12/18-1