"Southern California Gas Co. agreed to pay $4 million to settle criminal charges over the massive gas leak near Porter Ranch last year, but the utility still faces potentially costly civil actions from both residents and regulators."

"Officials around [Pennsylvania] are optimistic about the impact of Shell’s new ethane cracker on the local economy. It will bring thousands of construction jobs to western Pennsylvania and 600 permanent ones once it’s built along the Ohio River in Beaver County. The plant will produce 1.6 million tons of plastic a year out of the region’s natural gas."

"A Volkswagen engineer pleaded guilty on Friday to conspiring to defraud regulators and car owners, in the first criminal charges stemming from the American investigation into the German carmaker’s emissions deception."

"A coalition of researchers, utilities and state regulators have made progress tracking an unregulated and unwelcome contaminant in river water feeding drinking water supplies. Can they stop it?"

"A river in the far north of Siberia turned bright red this week, residents said, leading Russians to nickname the tributary the 'blood river.'"

"State regulators last year documented 276 new cases of groundwater contamination across Texas, a slight increase compared to 2014 but far fewer than in years past."

"Just south of Johnson Creek sits an abandoned landfill that time, and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, forgot."

"Environmentalists sued the Obama administration on Thursday seeking new federal water-quality standards designed to protect marine life against the corrosive effects of carbon emissions absorbed into the ocean from the burning of fossil fuels."

"Thirteen months after an Environmental Protection Agency mistake sent millions of gallons of bright orange wastewater into a Colorado river, the agency has declared the Gold King Mine and 47 other locations in the region Superfund sites, Colorado Public Radio reports."

"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will order wastewater disposal wells shut near the epicenter of a 5.6 magnitude earthquake that struck on Saturday around Pawnee, Oklahoma, local media reported on Tuesday."