Jarring ‘bad actors’ admission from red state oil regulator caught on tape

A lawyer for Oklahoma’s oil and gas regulator was recorded admitting that the agency has never pursued its “bad actors,” as a new investigation found the state has no record of ever punishing the company tied to more pollution reports than any other.

“I’ve been there 11 years doing this and we’ve never pursued what we call our ‘bad actors,’” Tracy Case, an attorney for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s oil and gas division, said at a national regulators’ conference in May, according to a recording obtained by The Frontier and ProPublica.

Case said the division is badly short-staffed while juggling hundreds of potential enforcement cases at a time. An agency spokesperson declined to comment to the outlets on her behalf.

The investigation centers on Citation Oil & Gas, one of the country’s largest privately held oil companies. Over the past decade, it has appeared more than 1,000 times in the agency’s database of pollution reports and other violations, far more than any other operator. The commission has no record of ever fining the company or completing an enforcement case against it.

In 2023, salty, oily wastewater was bursting from the ground in an oil field near Ardmore known as the Bayou. Agency staff blamed Citation’s injection wells and called it “an emergency situation.” State-hired consultants agreed the wells were operating at dangerously high pressures. Groundwater tests found the carcinogen benzene at five times the federal drinking water limit.

Staff recommended punishing the company, but instead, agency leaders let Citation restart injection in 2024 at pressures above what the consultants recommended. The state closed its investigation the following spring without taking further action.

“They wore us out,” one agency manager told the outlets.

Fewer than a third of roughly 750 enforcement cases the oil division has filed since 2023 have ended in punishment, and the average fine was about $1,700.

A Citation executive declined to answer written questions from the outlets, and a commission spokesperson cited possible future proceedings in declining to discuss the company. Citation has argued that the pollution comes from decades-old drilling and rainfall rather than its wells.

Other states have penalized the company, including Utah, which reached a $700,000 settlement with Citation in 2025 over a spill.

To boot, new complaints keep flowing, with rancher Mike Faulkner, whose land was hit by a wastewater purge this year, saying the company has “gotten away with it for a long time.”