A natural gas company ran two 1,680-horsepower industrial engines in a Pennsylvania community for more than six years, pumping out hazardous air pollutants the entire time, without ever completing the government-required test to prove those emissions were safe.

Investigation by EvilCorporations.com  |  Source: U.S. EPA Consent Agreement & Final Order, Filed July 15, 2025

Six Years of Dirty Air, Zero Accountability

Xpress Natural Gas, LLC operates a natural gas tank filling facility at 3814 North Road in Montrose, Pennsylvania, a small borough in Susquehanna County with about 1,500 residents. The company started firing up its two massive spark ignition engines in February 2017. Federal law required an initial pollution performance test within one year of startup. That means the test was due by February 2018. Xpress finally ran that test in June 2024, over six years late.

For every single one of those six-plus years, the people of Montrose and surrounding Susquehanna County had no government-verified data confirming whether the engines next door were operating within legal emissions limits. The company was emitting hazardous air pollutants into the shared air with no accountability, and the regulatory system took years to force the issue to resolution.

The settlement, finalized and filed on July 15, 2025, requires Xpress Natural Gas to pay $92,500 (roughly equivalent to two full years of median rent for an American household). In exchange, the company resolves all EPA civil penalty claims and, crucially, neither admits nor denies any of the underlying violations.

What Money Can’t Measure: The Real Price Paid by Montrose

Montrose, Pennsylvania is a borough of roughly 1,500 people in the northeastern corner of the state. It is the kind of place where people know their neighbors, where children ride bikes past the local diner, and where the cost of living is low enough that working families can still afford a yard. It is also the kind of place that gets chosen for industrial facilities precisely because the community has less political power to push back. Xpress Natural Gas set up its massive engine facility at 3814 North Road and, according to the EPA’s own findings, proceeded to operate those engines for six years without ever proving to any government authority that the emissions those engines produced were within legal limits.

The engines at the Montrose facility are not small pieces of equipment. Each one produces 1,680 brake horsepower, meaning they are categorized under federal law as engines “greater than 500 HP,” which is specifically the threshold that triggers the most rigorous testing requirements. These are industrial powerhouses burning natural gas and releasing hazardous air pollutants into the environment. The entire regulatory framework governing these engines, the National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants, exists because policymakers recognized that facilities like this one produce emissions that can cause serious harm to human health and the surrounding environment. The test that Xpress skipped for over six years is the mechanism by which the government verifies that those harms are being controlled.

When Xpress finally ran its performance test in June 2024, the result was that the EPA confirmed compliance. But that confirmation only covers the moment the test was taken. It tells us nothing about what the engines were actually emitting in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, or 2023. The whole point of the testing requirement is to catch problems before they become chronic, embedded harms. By skipping the test for six years, Xpress removed the community’s only mechanism for knowing whether the air they were breathing met federal safety standards. The people of Montrose did not get a say in that decision. It was made for them, by a company headquartered in Andover, Massachusetts, incorporated in Delaware, whose executives were far from the smoke.

The settlement agreement, signed by Xpress Chief Administrative Officer Seth Berry on June 24, 2025, includes the standard legal boilerplate that the company “neither admits nor denies” any of the specific factual violations. That framing is not an accident. It is a deliberate legal construction that allows Xpress to pay $92,500 (roughly what the average American working-class family takes home in about two years of full-time work) and walk away without any official acknowledgment of wrongdoing on the public record. For the residents of Montrose, that language means the company that operated unchecked industrial engines in their community for six years never had to stand up in public and say: we did this, and we are sorry.

Straight From the Government’s Mouth: The Documents Don’t Lie

These are verbatim passages from the EPA Consent Agreement filed July 15, 2025. Every word below is a direct quote from official government records.

“Pursuant to 40 C.F.R. § 60.4243(a)(2)(iii), Respondent was required to complete a performance test on each subject engine at the Facility within one year of the startup date, which was February 2017, making the performance test due by February 2018.” — EPA Consent Agreement, Paragraph 47

“Based on the information available to the EPA, Respondent failed to complete an initial performance test by February 2018.” — EPA Consent Agreement, Paragraph 48

“Based on the information available to the EPA, Respondent failed to conduct a subsequent performance test by February 2021.” — EPA Consent Agreement, Paragraph 49

“From at least February 2021 to June 12, 2024, Respondent violated 40 C.F.R. 60.4243(a)(2)(iii) and Section 112 of the Act, 42 U.S.C. § 7412, by failing to conduct a subsequent performance test after operating 8,760 hours or three (3) years, from the due date of the initial performance test.” — EPA Consent Agreement, Paragraph 50

“Respondent consents to the assessment of a civil penalty in the amount of Ninety-Two Thousand Five Hundred dollars ($92,500).” — EPA Consent Agreement, Paragraph 52

“Except as provided in Paragraph 5, above, Respondent neither admits nor denies the specific factual allegations set forth in this Consent Agreement. Except as provided in Paragraph 5, above, Respondent neither admits nor denies the alleged violations of law set forth in this Consent Agreement.” — EPA Consent Agreement, Paragraphs 6 and 7

Who Gets Hurt When the Tests Don’t Happen

Public Health: Six Years of Unverified Air

The engines at the Xpress facility in Montrose are legally classified as sources of hazardous air pollutants, which is why they fall under the EPA’s National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants, or NESHAPs. These are not theoretical regulatory categories. Hazardous air pollutants include substances like formaldehyde, benzene, and nitrogen oxides, compounds associated with cancer, respiratory disease, cardiovascular damage, and neurological harm. The entire testing regime exists to verify, with hard data, that these engines are not exceeding the limits designed to protect human health.

From February 2018 through June 2024, no verified performance test data confirmed that the Xpress engines in Montrose were within those limits. The company ran performance tests under a 2019 alternative monitoring plan and then determined, in its own assessment, that those tests were not suitable. The EPA confirmed compliance only after the June 2024 tests, meaning that for the prior years, residents near the facility had no official assurance that the air they were breathing met federal safety standards. Children attend school in Montrose. Elderly residents live nearby. Families garden, play outside, and open their windows in summer. None of them consented to being test subjects during Xpress’s years-long struggle to conduct a legally required emissions check.

Economic Inequality: Who Pays the Price When Regulations Aren’t Enforced

The $92,500 (roughly two years of median American household income) fine levied against Xpress Natural Gas illustrates one of the central mechanisms of economic inequality in America’s environmental enforcement system. Small communities with limited resources and political capital host industrial facilities that wealthier or more politically connected regions successfully exclude. Montrose, Pennsylvania is not Manhattan. It is not Silicon Valley. It is a rural working-class community with little leverage to demand corporate accountability on its own.

The penalty Xpress paid represents a fraction of the economic value the company derived from six-plus years of uninterrupted operations at the Montrose facility. The EPA’s own penalty criteria, cited in the Consent Agreement, explicitly include “the economic benefit of noncompliance” as a factor in calculating penalties. The $92,500 figure suggests the EPA calculated that Xpress derived limited economic benefit from skipping the tests, but the company still ran its facility, sold its product, and generated revenue throughout the entire violation period. The community received no compensation for six years of unverified pollution exposure. The fine went to the federal government, not to the people of Susquehanna County.

The “neither admits nor denies” legal resolution also has an economic dimension. It prevents this consent agreement from being used as evidence of wrongdoing in any future civil litigation. If a Montrose resident were to discover a health impact linked to the facility and attempt to hold Xpress accountable in court, this settlement provides them no ammunition. The legal system resolved the violation without creating a public record of corporate guilt, and the community has no formal finding of harm to build on.

The Numbers That Should Keep You Up at Night

They Got Away Easy. Here’s What You Can Do About It.

The People Who Signed This Deal

• Seth Berry, Chief Administrative Officer, Xpress Natural Gas, LLC: Signed the Consent Agreement on behalf of the company on June 24, 2025.
• Andrea Bain, Acting Director, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division, EPA Region 3: Signed and approved the agreement on the EPA’s behalf on July 14, 2025.

The Watchdogs You Should Be Pressuring

• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Region 3: The agency that negotiated this settlement. Ask them why the fine was $92,500 (about two years of median household income) for six years of violations, and why the community received nothing.
• Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP): The state agency that issued the operating permit and has ongoing regulatory authority over this facility. Demand they conduct their own independent review of the Montrose facility’s emissions history.
• Susquehanna County Commissioners: Your local elected officials have standing to demand answers from PADEP and to amplify community concerns to state legislators.
• Clean Air Act Citizen Suits: Under Section 304 of the Clean Air Act, private citizens and organizations can bring their own civil actions against violators or against the EPA for failure to enforce. A local environmental attorney can advise on whether this path is viable.

On the Ground: What Actually Works

Regulatory fines paid to the federal treasury do not protect communities. What protects communities is organized, sustained local pressure. Connect with existing Pennsylvania environmental justice organizations. Document the facility’s operations, file public records requests with PADEP for all inspection reports and permit compliance records for the Montrose facility, and build relationships with journalists who cover environmental enforcement in the Susquehanna region. No corporation has ever improved its behavior because a fine was quietly paid. They change behavior when communities make continued violations more expensive in reputational and political terms than compliance. That is the work, and it belongs to all of us.