Duke Energy has agreed to pay $20 million for groundwater contamination. $10-15 million will go toward cleanup, even though contamination never seeped far enough to harm private wells. The other $7 million will pay state fines. Initially, the Department of Environmental Quality held Duke responsible for $25.1 million in fines, but Duke was able to produce a paper trail indicating it had convinced then governor Beverly Perdue it was more interested in remediation than “costs of doing business.”