On Jan. 6, 2025, Congress certified the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States, triggering what has become a wide-ranging dismantling of the federal government’s environmental enforcement apparatus under his second administration.
On the same day, Targa Northern Delaware, LLC, a subsidiary of Targa Resources, filed a full-court-press defense against New Mexico’s Environment Department in a case over alleged air pollution violations going back years. It’s a case that troubles the department and environmental watchers like Melissa Troutman, a climate and health advocate with WildEarth Guardians.
“NMED is right to worry about this,” she said, referring to the state’s Environment Department. “These oil and gas regulators don’t have the resources to defend themselves from every company who might sue to shirk responsibility — that’s real.”
At issue is a series of emission violation allegations levied against Targa that resulted in a proposed $47.8 million fine — a state record — primarily for excess emissions at the company’s Red Hills natural gas processing plant in the state’s portion of the Permian Basin, the country’s most productive oil and gas field. All of this is wrapped in an official document called an administrative compliance order.
The order cites Targa for a failure to properly operate flare units at the Red Hills facility; failure to operate within emission limits; failure to submit excess emission reports in the proper timeframe; and failure to provide an analysis explaining the root cause of the emissions. The order also enumerates hundreds of excess emission reports filed with the state, tallying the release of 1.7 million pounds of volatile organic compounds and another 170,000 pounds of other regulated gases.
So far, dozens of motions, responses and hearing orders have flown between the two sides with no agreement reached. This is what has people like Troutman worried: In the Trump era of shrinking federal environmental enforcement, large companies may turn defensive energies — and money — toward fighting state regulation, while the state spends a small fortune defending its rules.
And Targa has a lot of money. It’s a midstream company that gathers, processes and transports natural gas. It also operates a facility on the Gulf Coast outside Houston, where it also owns a liquefied petroleum gas export terminal. Operations stretch from the Gulf of Mexico, across Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma and into New Mexico, Kansas and North Dakota. Its market value has nearly quadrupled to more than $50 billion since 2022. That’s the year Targa purchased Lucid Energy and its Red Hills plant and began dealing with the New Mexico state government over pollution reports from the plant.
In its initial filing in response to state regulators, Targa highlighted the “unique circumstances” of the order, namely that the vast majority of recorded violations occurred prior to Targa’s acquisition of the Red Hills facility. It also noted “Targa’s extraordinary efforts to bring [Red Hills] into full compliance as quickly as possible following acquisition.” In a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing last month, Targa reported spending $140 million on improvements at the plant by the end of 2024.
In March 2025, the company followed the initial filing with seven separate motions to dismiss parts or all of the Environment Department’s case, including a constitutional argument that the case violates Targa’s Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.
Among other arguments, Targa contests the Environment Department’s dismissal of a root cause analysis by the company of the plant’s problems; contests how the department calculated penalties; contests a late reporting violation; and argues that the department doesn’t have the authority to assess administrative compliance costs — essentially the cost the department incurs by prosecuting Targa. In all, 35 legal volleys between Targa and the state had been filed by July.
Targa did not respond to multiple requests from Capital & Main for comment.
There are few other cases on the Environment Department’s docket that come close to the Targa case either in terms of length or number of filings.
Drew Goretzka, director of communications at the Environment Department, said the case “remains one of — or the — longest unresolved matters in the department.” He continued, “This enforcement case has disproportionately consumed the Department’s technical and legal resources.”
So far, the Targa fight has cost the department about $225,000 in staff time, Goretzka said. “The sheer volume of excess emissions by a single operator in this case makes it unusual and complicated.”
The case is rooted in a technical and somewhat obscure zone of New Mexico state affairs called administrative compliance orders, which are debated before a hearing officer rather than in a court of law. Orders generally include a list of violations, what should be done to fix them and keep them from recurring, and often a proposed penalty. The Environment Department compliance order against Targa alleged violations of New Mexico’s Air Quality Control Act, proposed steps to fix them and assessed the $47.8 million fine.
The Environment Department’s Docketed Matters page shows that cases typically involve a few volleys of legal briefs between a company and the state, with the two sides eventually holding negotiations and settling the dispute within a year. Cases go to a court of law if a settlement can’t be reached. Settlements are often quick since violation notices are often based on reports filed by the companies themselves or witnessed by state regulators. In the Environment Department’s compliance order against Targa, three of the four alleged violations include the descriptions “supported by data agreed upon by Targa and NMED” or “This violation is supported by [reports] submitted by Targa.”
“People like to make ‘responsibility’ complicated, but it’s not,” said Troutman, the WildEarth Guardians advocate. “One of the first things we teach kids in schools is, if you contribute to a mess, you help clean it up.”
The dispute really begins when Targa bought a company called Lucid Energy in July 2022, acquiring the Red Hills plant in the process. Along with the sprawling facility, Targa also acquired a history of excess emissions reported by Lucid Energy to the Environment Department’s Air Quality Bureau between 2018 and 2021.
The bureau regulates all manner of air pollution across the state, but, Goretzka said, “Approximately 60% of the Air Quality Bureau’s technical workload is directly or indirectly related to the oil and natural gas industry.”
He also said that roughly 30% of the department’s new Compliance and Enforcement Division’s time is consumed with oil and gas investigations and enforcement, even though there are five other divisions and 20 bureaus in the department, most of which don’t deal with oilfield matters.
Facilities that emit air pollution as part of their normal business — like factories or cement plants or natural gas processing plants — have to get a license from the state that sets limits on how much can be legally released into the atmosphere, generally set out in tons per year. At the end of February, there were approximately 3,000 such facilities in New Mexico routinely emitting air pollution.
Goretzka said it is difficult to track all of the data coming from so many sources.
“Our Air Quality Bureau is working with a 21st century industry using 20th century technology.” He called the bureau’s data system “antiquated” and said that “Air Quality Bureau staff are working harder — not smarter — to perform basic tasks.”
And it’s clear the mostly self-reported system doesn’t catch every instance a facility releases regulated gases. The department occasionally receives reports from the International Methane Emissions Observatory, a U.N. Environment Program project that uses satellites to spot major emissions around the globe. Goretzka said all reports the Environment Department receives from the observatory end up revealing previously unreported leaks.
While under Lucid ownership, Red Hills repeatedly filed excess emission reports with the Environment Department. Following the 2022 takeover, Targa submitted a revised set of those reports, marking the start of two years of back-and-forth over updated reports, questions about those reports and requests for extended deadlines.
Meanwhile, Targa filed another 754 excess emission reports in 2024, 635 of them from the Red Hills plant — 35% of all excess emissions reports filed in the state that year and far more than any other company or facility in New Mexico. In December 2024, the Environment Department slapped the company with the compliance order, mandated the proposed clean-ups , repairs and procedural changes needed and issued the record $47.8 million fine.
Following the compliance order and the reported $140 million in improvements, Targa’s filings dropped to 128 excess emission reports in 2025, 111 of those from the Red Hills gas plant, according to Environment Department records. The number of Targa facilities reporting excess emissions also dropped from 14 to four over the year.
Targa is far from the only polluter in New Mexico. Forty-one companies filed 1,159 excess emission reports in 2025. Even with its sharp reductions, the Red Hills plant still filed more than any other facility except for the HF Sinclair Navajo Refinery in Artesia, which had 206.
Even though excess emissions reports across the state dropped year over year, Goretzka said, “Given the current levels of excess emissions and the number of new permits for oil and gas facilities, we must increase our inspection presence in the oilfields.”
What would that look like? “We need to hire 20 additional inspectors,” he said. The Environment Department has plans to seek increased air permit fees to pay for those positions before its governing Environmental Improvement Board on March 23. That’s far from assured since previous requests haven’t always been approved.
Troutman of WildEarth Guardians said that the same companies show up again and again in spills and emissions reports. Her group tracks oilfield pollution violations on a quarterly basis and recently released a study of oilfield spills for 2025 based on data from the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division. While the Environment Department regulates large facility emissions, the division permits new wells, collects production data and enforces the state’s oilfield regulations.
The Guardians report tallied 38,153 spills reported to the Oil Conservation Division last year, an average of 104 a day. The overwhelming majority of those were natural gas flares and leaks — this despite the fact that routine venting and flaring has been illegal since 2021.
At a budget hearing before the Senate Finance Committee during the recent legislative session, Erin Taylor, the acting cabinet secretary for the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department — the managing agency for the Oil Conservation Division — said the division returned $1.6 million of its budget to the state general fund last year “primarily from salary vacancy savings and a historically high vacancy rate” of 24%. Even so, it approved 3,230 new wells last year.
Testifying at the same hearing, Ben Shelton, deputy secretary of Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources, said, “We’re just always necessarily a step behind” the private sector in job pay, leading to the high vacancy rate. Meanwhile the Division didn’t ask for any new positions despite a recent report by E&E News/Politico finding New Mexico had far fewer oilfield inspectors than states that produce far less oil and gas. That has been the case for years.
Sidney Hill, public information officer with the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, said in an email that the Oil Conservation Division currently has 20 vacant positions. Most, he said, are “more related to permitting functions.” He said the division has not seen a severe decline in enforcement and monitoring and performed more than 17,000 inspections in the second half of 2025.
Troutman proffered a blunt take on both departments’ enforcement situations. “If the state can’t enforce its own laws, then it should stop issuing new permits until it can,” she said.
“There are solutions, like funding the agencies to be able to do their job,” Troutman continued. “But the current administration has failed to enact these solutions, year after year.”
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
When asked for a broader, national perspective on oilfield rules enforcement, Holly Hopkins, a vice president at the American Petroleum Institute — the country’s preeminent industry group — said, “The oil and natural gas industry supports balanced, science-based regulations that provide a framework for safe and responsible energy development. The fair and consistent enforcement of those regulations is equally important.”
Hopkins went on to say, “U.S. oil and natural gas production is subject to some of the most comprehensive environmental and safety standards in the world, often exceeding those of many other producing countries.”
In an SEC filing in mid-February, Targa reported that it would continue to “vigorously defend” the company against the Environment Department case. The company also reported net income of $1.9 billion for 2025, a 46% increase over the previous year.
Meanwhile, the Environment Department has been in closed-door discussions with Targa since late January over next steps. It is unclear when that may end or what the next stage will be.
