Steel Dynamics' Sinton mill and a handful of refineries lead Texas industrial plants in recent EPA permit exceedances

Summary

The question did not name a state, so this report answers for Texas, which has by far the largest concentration of heavy industrial, petrochemical and refining facilities in EPA's national compliance database. Using EPA's ECHO Exporter facility-compliance data (checked 2026-09-26):

• Water permits (Clean Water Act): Steel Dynamics Southwest — Sinton Division (steel mill, Sinton, TX) had 73 effluent-limit exceedances in its discharge monitoring reports over the last 13 quarters — the most of any Texas industrial facility that has a reported count. It is followed by Wyman-Gordon Forgings (Houston, 53), Huntsman Petrochemical's C4 Plant (Port Neches, 52), Ash Grove cement plant (Midlothian, 39), and Shell Chemical (Deer Park, 33).
• Air permits (Clean Air Act): EPA's rolled-up metric here is quarters-in-noncompliance out of the last 12, not a raw violation count, and it is capped at 12 — so a large number of Texas plants (refineries, a power station, steel mills, compressor stations) are tied at the maximum, having been in CAA noncompliance in every one of the last 12 quarters. Among those tied-at-12 plants, the Port Arthur Plant (petrochemicals) stands out with $3.75 million in penalties and 8 formal enforcement actions — the most severe enforcement record of the group — followed by Gerdau's Midlothian steel plant and Valero's Corpus Christi West refinery.

Data and method, including what the water filter excluded

Source: EPA ECHO Exporter (Envirofacts), loaded into this corpus's environment.epa_facilities table and its environment.facility_compliance view. This is a keyless, weekly-refreshed national snapshot with no year dimension — it reports EPA's own current rolling-window rollups, not a filterable year-by-year history, so 'recently' here means EPA's own most-recent 13-quarter (water) and 12-quarter (air) reporting windows as of the snapshot date.

Facilities were scoped to primary NAICS codes for manufacturing (31–33), utilities/power generation, oil & gas extraction and mining (21, 211–213, 2211–2212) to match 'industrial plants,' filtered to Texas (state_abbr='TX'). That scope returns 15,518 Texas facilities.

Exclusion, named exactly: the water ranking applied the filter c.cwa_effluent_exceedance_count IS NOT NULL to the same 15,518-facility population. That single predicate removed 15,185 of the 15,518 in-scope Texas facilities (98%), leaving only 333 facilities (2%) with any reported CWA effluent-exceedance value to rank. Without that filter, ORDER BY c.cwa_effluent_exceedance_count DESC would put every NULL-valued facility at the bottom (or scattered, depending on NULL handling) rather than showing a meaningful rank, since NULL here is not the same as zero — it means EPA's ECHO rollup has no discharge-monitoring-report data for that facility at all, most likely because it holds no NPDES surface-water discharge permit (many manufacturing/mining sites discharge to a municipal sewer system instead, or hold no water discharge permit). The headline statistic is unchanged whether or not the filter is applied: Steel Dynamics Sinton's 73 is still the maximum non-null value in the full 15,518-facility set, because every excluded row is NULL, not a competing number. But the population this ranking speaks for is the 333 monitored facilities, not all 15,518 in-scope Texas industrial plants — which is a real restriction on what 'exceeded permit limits the most' can mean here.

Air-side metric limitation: caa_qtrs_in_noncompliance counts quarters (not individual violations) and is capped at 12 — many plants tie at the ceiling, so it cannot distinguish a plant violating once a quarter from one violating continuously. Total penalties and formal-enforcement-action counts were used as a secondary tiebreaker among the tied plants, a reasonable but not identical proxy for violation frequency. EPA's own facility-level, itemized CAA violation count (as opposed to this quarterly rollup) is not carried in this table.

One entry worth flagging: 'Upper Martinez Creek WWTF' (San Antonio, 51 CWA exceedances) is coded to a manufacturing NAICS code but is named as a wastewater treatment facility — likely a NAICS mis-coding in the source data rather than a true manufacturing plant, so it was left out of the headline chart above but is visible in the underlying query.

Caveats

• State choice: Texas was selected by the analyst as illustrative of a heavy-industry state, since the question left this unspecified; the same query pattern applies to any other state by changing the state_abbr filter.
• This is a snapshot of EPA's current rolling compliance windows, not a trend — it cannot show whether exceedances are rising or falling over time.
• 'Significant noncompliance' flags (snc_flag='Y') were visible in the data for most of the tied-at-12 air list, indicating EPA itself considers these facilities in a serious violation category, not just borderline late paperwork.

Every query behind this report

4 warehouse calls ran in this session, in order. Each is reproducible against the same snapshot.

SELECT f.registry_id, f.facility_name, f.city, f.state_abbr, f.naics_codes,
       c.caa_qtrs_in_noncompliance, c.cwa_qtrs_in_noncompliance, c.rcra_qtrs_in_noncompliance,
       c.cwa_effluent_exceedance_count, c.formal_action_count, c.total_penalties, c.snc_flag
FROM environment.epa_facilities f
JOIN environment.facility_compliance c ON f.registry_id = c.registry_id
WHERE f.state_abbr = 'TX'
  AND (f.naics_codes ILIKE '31%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '32%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '33%'
       OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '2211%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '2212%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '211%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '212%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '213%')
  AND c.cwa_effluent_exceedance_count IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY c.cwa_effluent_exceedance_count DESC
LIMIT 15

SELECT f.registry_id, f.facility_name, f.city, f.state_abbr, f.naics_codes,
       c.caa_qtrs_in_noncompliance, c.cwa_qtrs_in_noncompliance, c.rcra_qtrs_in_noncompliance,
       c.formal_action_count, c.total_penalties, c.snc_flag
FROM environment.epa_facilities f
JOIN environment.facility_compliance c ON f.registry_id = c.registry_id
WHERE f.state_abbr = 'TX'
  AND (f.naics_codes ILIKE '31%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '32%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '33%'
       OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '2211%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '2212%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '211%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '212%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '213%')
ORDER BY c.caa_qtrs_in_noncompliance DESC NULLS LAST
LIMIT 15

SELECT COUNT(*) AS null_count
FROM environment.epa_facilities f
JOIN environment.facility_compliance c ON f.registry_id = c.registry_id
WHERE f.state_abbr = 'TX'
  AND (f.naics_codes ILIKE '31%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '32%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '33%'
       OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '2211%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '2212%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '211%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '212%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '213%')
  AND c.cwa_effluent_exceedance_count IS NULL

SELECT COUNT(*) AS total_count
FROM environment.epa_facilities f
JOIN environment.facility_compliance c ON f.registry_id = c.registry_id
WHERE f.state_abbr = 'TX'
  AND (f.naics_codes ILIKE '31%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '32%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '33%'
       OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '2211%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '2212%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '211%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '212%' OR f.naics_codes ILIKE '213%')