The Arkansas Division of Environmental Quality is fining one of South Arkansas’ bromine producers for Clean Air Act violations after a company it hired didn’t actually complete reported leak detection inspections for 10 months.
Lanxess, formerly Great Lakes Chemical Corporation, has agreed to pay the division $27,000 in civil penalties, according to a consent administrative order posted online. A DEQ inspection last year of the company’s South and Central plants in Union County found it had not been following federal air pollution rules regarding monitoring for leaks from its chemical production units at those plants. Lanxess neither admitted to nor denied the “factual and legal allegations” in the consent order.
According to an inspection report filed by DEQ inspectors, the manager of the plants, Kevin Hazen, contacted the regulator’s headquarters in North Little Rock last February to report that Alliance Technical Group, a firm hired by Lanxess to conduct leak detection and repair (LDAR) inspections, had “failed to conduct approximately 10 months of LDAR readings” between January and October of 2023.
The company became aware of the issue in October 2023, documents from DEQ show. It notified the state regulators in February 2024.
The latest consent order comes after Lanxess was fined $68,520 in August 2023 by DEQ over leak detection violations, after Lanxess reported that certain components in some of its production units – including some listed in the 2025 consent order – had been listed as “out-of-service” for an undetermined period of time. The division and the company entered into a consent order alleging that Lanxess failed to maintain equipment leak records.
“Unfortunately, about 10 months of LDAR readings were not conducted due to the Alliance staff not performing them,” wrote Demetria Kimbrough, the head of DEQ’s air office, in a February 2024 email to colleagues summarizing Hazen’s verbal report to the division.
A voicemail requesting comment directed to the Alliance office in Little Rock was not returned.
A Lanxess audit of “invalid” inspections supposedly conducted by Alliance during the timeframe reported examining the time between inspections “to evaluate if the rate of inspections was realistic given the analyzer response time and distance between components.” The audit found that the “time between inspections was often only a few seconds, providing further indication that these inspections were invalid.”
Specifically, DEQ is fining Lanxess for “failing to conduct accurate GPS coordinate logging of LDAR monitoring.” The Clean Air Act has a variety of leak detection provisions for different industries and processes that can introduce pollutants into the air. These requirements are incorporated into the permits obtained by facilities like Lanxess’ bromine production plants in Union County.
The affected processes that had deficient leak inspections included methyl bromide production equipment, oligomer production equipment, phosgene production equipment, dibromostyrene production equipment, PHT-4 production equipment, polydibromostyrene production equipment and tribromophenol production equipment found at the Lanxess Central and Lanxess South plants. Many of the chemicals are used in flame retardants.
Lanxess’ operations have been beset by run-ins with environmental regulators, having been assessed hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties by Arkansas regulators over the last decade for violations of water and air pollution regulations at its bromine production facilities.
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