LITTLE ROCK-Exxon Mobil has paid a $2.63 million fine more than three years after its Pegasus pipeline ruptured and spilled thousands of gallons of crude into a Mayflower neighborhood.
Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration spokesman Damon Hill saud the company paid the fine on April 21.
The oil company has 89 days from April 1, the date of the agency's final order of compliance, to decide whether to challenge the far-reaching order in a federal appeals court.
"We continue to evaluate our options on the Final Order, including a possible appeal," Exxon Mobil spokeswoman Ashley Smith Alemayehu said in an email.
The oil company just had 20 days to appeal or pay the fine, but federal regulations give such companies more time to seek judicial review of agency action.
The compliance order could be far more significant than the fine for a company as large as Exxon Mobil. The oil giant estimated its earnings at $16.2 billion in 2015 compared with $32.5 billion in 2014.
The order requires the oil company to change its integrity management project to ensure that it adequately identifies risks and addresses its entire pre-1970 electric-resistance welded pipe, not just Pegasus pipeline problems.
Richard Kuprewicz, a pipeline safety consultant who has been advising Central Arkansas Water, said he believes the agency is correct to have concerns about the risks on Exxon Mobil's other pipelines older than the 1970s.
"I get what (the agency) is saying and fully support it," he said.
If the oil company takes its case to court, it likely will ask the court to stay, or delay, implementation of the compliance order until there's a ruling in the case.