you are responsible for cleaning it up.
- U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara
On April 4, 2914, the Department of Justice settled with Anadarko Petroleum Corporation for $5.15 billion.
That's billion with a b.
It is the Department of Justice's largest environmental recovery.
Who is Anadarko Petroleum Corporation? They are an oil and gas extraction company, since 1953. They bought Kerr-McGee in 2005, believing they were buying just gas and oil extraction investments, but they were buying the company's entire toxic legacy.
History
Kerr-McGee was founded by Robert Kerr in 1929 as a gas and oil drilling firm. Later, Kerr partnered with geologist Dean McGee in 1946. They focused, primarily, on offshore drilling.
However, in the 1950s, a new fuel beckoned: uranium.
They entered into an agreement with the Navajo Tribe and began uranium mining on tribal land and processing in nearby Oklahoma.
The Oklahoma processing plant became infamous in 1974 when Karen Silkwood was contaminated at the plant and later died in a mysterious car accident after attending a union meeting.
In 1978, the Navajo Tribal Counsel passed two tax ordinances on mineral rights and business activity. Kerr-McGee took them to court in a case that made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the ruling of the 9th Circuit Court finding that no Federal law prohibited a tribe from collecting a tax.
Environmental Concerns
In 1980, a movie was made about the life of Karen Silkwood, a uranium processor at Kerr-McGee's Oklahoma's Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site. Americans became paying closer attention to a company called Kerr-McGee.
The mines were closed in 1986, as health and environmental concerns mounted. In 1994, the EPA created the Navajo Superfund Site.
The contamination wasn't limited to the Southwest. Kerr-McGee ran a radioactive materials processing plant in Chicago. Now, it is a collection of Superfund sites.
In 2005, Kerr-McGee split its oil and gas division from its nuclear and chemical division. The cast off division became Tronox, spun off. Anadarko Petroleum purchased what was left of Kerr-McGee in 2006.
Part of the settlement with the Department of Justice includes an declaration that this spin-off and acquisition was nothing more than a tactic to evade Federal penalties, hence the settlement with Anadarko and not with what remains of Tronox.
Tronox declared bankruptcy in 2009 and reorganized in 2011 as a corporation solely focused mineral sands extraction and titanium dioxide production.
Pretty complex stuff. It's a win in the environmental column and a shot across the bow to an industry that has long played fast and loose with environmental stewardship and worker safety.
Are we out of the clear? Anadarko played a role in the Deepwater Horizon Spill and has been battling with British Petroleum about paying its share of the cleanup costs. They have deepwater drill sites throughout the Gulf and drill sites in Colorado’s Denver-Julesburg Basin.
Who knows if Kerr-McGee's toxic legacy ends here. All we do know is that it's about high time the companies who made the mess start cleaning up the mess they made.