TL;DR
- Cunningham Energy, LLC, a West Virginia oil and gas company, and its parent corporation Houston Natural Resources Corp (a Nevada company based in Houston, Texas) reached a settlement with the EPA on June 28, 2024, for eleven separate Clean Air Act violations at two natural gas production sites in Bomont, West Virginia.
- The violations took place at two pads on the Bomont Site: the King Pad and the Cochran Pad. They span from as early as 2016 and run through at least 2022, meaning communities near these facilities lived with illegal air pollution for up to six years without any required monitoring or control equipment in place.
- At the King Pad, toxic Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) emissions were being vented through an open-ended pipe directly into the atmosphere. The required vapor recovery unit was absent for months, and storage vessel hatches were confirmed leaking by EPA inspectors using infrared cameras.
- Cunningham Energy also failed to monitor fugitive emissions at the King Pad for nearly four years (September 2018 to June 2022) and never developed an emissions monitoring plan. At the Cochran Pad, the company skipped required annual compliance certifications for four straight years (2017 through 2020).
- The total civil penalty is $742,737. Because the companies claimed financial hardship, EPA agreed to a payment plan: a down payment of just $14,855 up front, with the rest due six months later. The penalty applies jointly to both companies, which are now legally bound together as parent and subsidiary.
- Neither company admits any wrongdoing. The consent agreement states they “neither admit nor deny the specific factual allegations.”
Open Pipe Into the Sky: How Cunningham Energy Spent Years Breaking Clean Air Rules Above a West Virginia Community
Eleven Clean Air Act violations. Six years of missed monitoring. VOC gases released directly into the atmosphere. And a $742,737 settlement that lets both companies walk away without admitting a single fact.
What No Fine Can Fix
Bomont is a small community in Clay County, West Virginia. Clay County is one of the poorest counties in the United States. The people who live near Shelton Road are not energy executives. They are not shareholders. They do not own stock in Houston Natural Resources Corp, the Nevada-incorporated parent company that controls Cunningham Energy from a suite in Houston, Texas. They breathe the air.
Volatile Organic Compounds are not an abstraction. They are real chemicals that escape from oil and gas production — hydrocarbons like benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene — that form ground-level ozone, trigger respiratory illness, damage the nervous system, and at high enough exposures, cause cancer. When the EPA’s inspector arrived at the King Pad on May 6, 2021, they pointed an infrared camera at the storage vessel hatches and watched gas pour out. That moment had been repeating itself, invisibly, since at least June 2017, when the first storage vessel came online.
The permit was clear. The company was required to capture at least 95% of those VOC emissions within 60 days of startup and route them through a vapor recovery unit into a sales gas pipeline. Instead, the emissions were being vented through an open-ended pipe. Into the air. For years.
Nobody living near the Bomont Site received a letter telling them the vapor recovery unit was missing. No one knocked on doors. No regulatory agency showed up in 2017, or 2018, or 2019. The company also never developed the emissions monitoring plan it was legally required to have. That means no one inside the company was systematically looking for leaks either. The monitoring that should have happened quarterly or semi-annually at the King Pad simply did not happen from September 2018 until June 2022. Four years. The residents of the area around Bomont had no way of knowing what was in the air they were breathing, because the company responsible for telling regulators never bothered to check.
Over at the Cochran Pad, Cunningham Energy was required to submit a G70-D Annual Certification every year by February 21st — a document confirming it was doing what its permit required. The company skipped four consecutive years: 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. Annual reports required under federal Clean Air Act regulations for the Cochran Pad were also missing for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. Six years of federal reports, gone. The reporting system exists precisely so that regulators and, indirectly, the public can track what is being emitted and whether controls are working. Cunningham Energy’s silence made that system useless.
The settlement does not require Cunningham Energy or Houston Natural Resources Corp to pay for any health screening of the people who lived nearby. It does not require them to fund air quality monitoring in the community. It does not require them to acknowledge that people were harmed. The penalty, paid in two installments with interest, goes to the federal government. The people of Bomont get nothing except the assurance that the companies now say they are in compliance.
What the Documents Actually Say
The following are verbatim quotes from the EPA Consent Agreement and Final Order, Docket No. CAA-03-2024-0119, filed June 28, 2024. These are the government’s own words.
“From at least May 2021 to August 2021, the King Pad’s VOC emissions were being emitted from an open-ended pipe into the atmosphere and as a result, at least 95% of VOC emissions from storage vessels 31S and 34S were not collected since the startup of the vessels in June 2017 and July 2018.”
— EPA Consent Agreement, Paragraph 57
- This confirms the vapor recovery system was effectively non-functional from the moment these storage vessels came online: June 2017 and July 2018. The EPA did not discover this until its May 2021 inspection. That is a gap of approximately three to four years during which no one inside or outside the company caught this failure.
- The law required 95% capture of VOCs within 60 days of startup. The company missed that deadline by years, not months. The emissions were not trickling out through a faulty seal; they were going out through an open pipe.
“At the time of the Inspection, the EPA Inspector observed emissions from multiple storage vessel thief hatches at the King Pad using a FLIR camera.”
— EPA Consent Agreement, Paragraph 62
- A FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared) camera makes invisible gas emissions visible on video. When the inspector pointed the camera at the storage tanks, they could see gas escaping from the access hatches. The permit required an impermeable barrier across the entire surface of the liquid in each storage vessel. The inspection proved that barrier did not exist.
- This is direct physical evidence, not a paperwork dispute. Gases were leaving the tank. The company’s own permit said they should not be.
“From at least September 2018 to June 2022, Respondent CE failed to monitor all fugitive emissions components at the King Pad since its permit was issued in December 2018.”
— EPA Consent Agreement, Paragraph 74
- The fugitive emissions monitoring requirement existed from the first day the King Pad permit was issued in December 2018. The company never performed it. The violation ran for approximately 3.5 years before the EPA investigation forced a correction.
- Fugitive emissions monitoring is the mechanism that catches leaks from valves, connectors, flanges, and other components before they become large-scale releases. Without it, there is no systematic way to know what is escaping from the facility.
“From at least 2017 to 2021, Respondent CE failed to submit an annual certification for the Cochran Pad by February 21st of each year.”
— EPA Consent Agreement, Paragraph 91
- This covers the annual certifications for 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. These certifications exist so that regulators can verify the facility is operating within its permit limits each year. Four consecutive missed certifications means West Virginia regulators and the EPA were operating without four years of required compliance data from this site.
- The annual reports required under federal regulations for the Cochran Pad were also missing for six straight years (2016 through 2021), covering the same period and compounding the information blackout.
“For purposes of this Consent Agreement and Final Order only, Respondents agree to be jointly and severally liable for the civil penalties in paragraph 113 as CE is the wholly-owned subsidiary of HNRC.”
— EPA Consent Agreement, Paragraph 14
- Houston Natural Resources Corp, headquartered in Houston, Texas, acquired Cunningham Energy as a wholly-owned subsidiary effective July 7, 2023. This consent agreement makes both the Texas-based parent company and the West Virginia operating company jointly responsible for paying the penalty.
- The phrasing “for purposes of this Consent Agreement only” is standard legal boilerplate that protects the companies from this admission being used in any future proceeding. It is not a denial; it is a legal firewall.
Who Pays When a Company Doesn’t
Environmental Degradation
The Bomont Site failures created a multi-year window of uncontrolled and unmonitored atmospheric pollution in a rural West Virginia community.
- VOC emissions from storage tanks 31S and 34S were released through an open-ended pipe continuously from their startup dates of June 2017 and July 2018 through at least August 2021, bypassing a vapor recovery system that was legally mandated to capture 95% of those emissions.
- An EPA inspector confirmed in May 2021 that gas was visibly escaping from multiple storage vessel thief hatches on the King Pad, meaning multiple tanks were simultaneously releasing uncontrolled emissions at the time of inspection. The duration of this leakage prior to inspection is unknown because no monitoring was ever conducted.
- Fugitive emissions monitoring was absent at the King Pad from September 2018 to June 2022. Fugitive leaks from valves, connectors, and flanges went undetected and unrepaired during this entire period, with no documented effort to identify or quantify the releases.
- No engineering assessment of the closed vent system was ever conducted from at least July 2018 to December 2021, meaning the company had no verified basis for claiming its emissions control infrastructure was adequate. The system’s capacity and design were never certified by a qualified engineer as required.
Public Health
The communities nearest to the Bomont Site bore the health risk of years of uncontrolled VOC releases with no warning, no monitoring data, and no recourse built into the settlement.
- Volatile Organic Compounds are precursors to ground-level ozone (smog), which the EPA links to aggravated asthma, reduced lung function, increased respiratory infections, and cardiovascular stress. Clay County, West Virginia already has some of the worst health outcomes in the state, making additional air pollution burdens especially severe.
- Benzene and other hazardous air pollutants are commonly co-released with VOC emissions from oil and gas storage vessels. Long-term benzene exposure is a documented cause of leukemia. The settlement contains no requirement for health screening of nearby residents or testing of the air for specific hazardous compounds during the violation period.
- The six-year gap in annual reports for the Cochran Pad and four-year gap for the King Pad means state and federal health authorities had no emissions data during which these operations were active. Epidemiological studies require this data to establish causation; without it, any health effects in the surrounding community cannot be formally linked to the facility.
- The company never developed an emissions monitoring plan at the King Pad, which is the foundational document for a systematic leak detection and repair program. Without it, workers at the facility also lacked formal protocols for identifying and reporting dangerous emission levels.
Economic Inequality
The structure of this settlement concentrates all financial benefit inside the regulatory system while leaving the rural, low-income community that absorbed the pollution with no direct compensation.
- The $742,737 penalty goes entirely to the federal government, not to Clay County, not to West Virginia, and not to individuals who lived near the Bomont Site. No environmental remediation fund, no community benefit agreement, and no health monitoring program is required by the settlement.
- EPA agreed to a payment installment plan because the companies certified they could not pay the full penalty within 30 days without “undue financial hardship.” The down payment was set at $14,855, roughly 2% of the total penalty. The bulk of the payment ($727,882 plus $21,537 in interest) was deferred for 180 days.
- Houston Natural Resources Corp, the parent company that acquired Cunningham Energy in July 2023, operates from Greenway Plaza in Houston, Texas. The economic extraction from rural West Virginia continues under corporate ownership structures registered in Nevada and Texas, while the environmental and health consequences remain local.
- Neither company is required to invest in upgraded emissions control infrastructure beyond what their existing permits already mandate. The settlement resolves only the penalty; it does not create new obligations to improve operations beyond minimum compliance.
The Numbers in Context
Total civil penalty assessed against Cunningham Energy, LLC and Houston Natural Resources Corp for eleven Clean Air Act violations spanning up to six years at two natural gas production pads in Bomont, West Virginia.
$14,855The actual cash required from these companies within the first 30 days of the settlement. That is the government’s opening price for years of open-pipe VOC emissions, absent storage covers, zero fugitive monitoring, and six years of missing federal reports.
For context: the EPA’s own penalty policy calculates fines based in part on the “economic benefit of noncompliance” — meaning the money a company saved by not installing and maintaining required equipment. That savings is effectively baked into what they’re now being asked to pay back, with interest at 6% per annum.
Separate Clean Air Act violations charged across two sites, spanning at minimum 2016 to 2022. Violations include: uncontrolled VOC venting, missing vapor recovery equipment, leaking storage vessel covers, no closed vent system assessment, no fugitive emissions monitoring, no emissions monitoring plan, missing engine hour records, missing annual certifications (4 years, Cochran Pad), missing VOC emissions determinations, missing site-specific emissions sampling, and missing annual federal reports (up to 6 years).
Who to Watch and What to Demand
The companies have stated they are now in compliance. The settlement is a final agency action. But compliance today does not erase the years of uncontrolled pollution, and it does not prevent the same playbook from being used again by the same corporate structure.
Corporate Leadership Named in This Document
- Ryan Cunningham, Manager of Cunningham Energy, LLC, signed the consent agreement on June 7, 2024. He is the responsible officer for the operating company at 3230 Pennsylvania Avenue, Charleston, WV 25302.
- Frank Kristan, President of Houston Natural Resources Corp, signed on June 6, 2024. He is the head of the parent company at 12 Greenway Plaza, Suite 1100, Houston, Texas 77046, operating under the domain hnrcholdings.com.
- Both officers signed a legal certification that all information provided to the EPA about the companies’ financial condition was “true, accurate, and complete.” Submitting false information to the federal government carries separate civil and criminal liability.
Regulatory Watchlist
Mutual Aid and Grassroots Action
- Connect with West Virginia environmental justice organizations already working in Clay County and surrounding areas. Groups embedded in the community have the relationships and local knowledge that regulators lack. Find them through the West Virginia Rivers Coalition and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC).
- Demand that Clay County elected officials request that WVDEP conduct independent air quality monitoring near the Bomont Site at public expense. Community members should not have to pay to find out what they were breathing.
- Submit public comments to EPA Region 3 requesting that any future consent agreements in West Virginia include community benefit provisions: health screening funds, local air monitoring, and direct notification to residents when violations are identified.
- Document and share. If you live near the Bomont Site in Bomont, WV 25030, write down dates, odors, visible emissions, and any health symptoms you or your family have experienced near the facility. This creates a contemporaneous record that can support future investigations or litigation.
- Contact the office of your U.S. Senator or Representative and ask them to support strengthened Clean Air Act enforcement funding. Consent agreements with deferred payment schedules and no community compensation are a direct result of an under-resourced EPA enforcement division.
The source document for this investigation is attached below.
The CAFO between this polluting company and the EPA can be found here: https://yosemite.epa.gov/oa/rhc/epaadmin.nsf/Filings/8653FA93E015987A85258B4A005D7DF5/$File/Cunningham%20Energy%20LLC_Houston%20Natural%20Resources%20Corp_CAA%20CAFO_June%2028%202024.pdf
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