The following is a transcript of the virtual meeting held by the ECMC Commissioners on Friday, December 13 to address the falsified laboratory data reports made to the ECMC. Where appropriate, we have edited the transcript for clarity and brevity, and added emphasis to improve readability.
Julie Murphy: Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Commissioners, and thanks to folks who are tuning in early this morning.
My name is Julie Murphy, and I’m the director of the Energy and Carbon Management Commission. I am, of course, disappointed by the circumstances that lead to today’s hearing, yet I’m grateful for the opportunity to share more information that members of the public, that each of you, that the press, and our local government partners have been curious about.
The purpose of the hearing is for me to provide an update about our ongoing investigation. I would remind us all this is an active ongoing investigation, and we are balancing transparency and accountability in our enforcement process.
In my estimation, the commission does not need to take action today. AG Mercer is, of course, available to you individually or through executive session to provide counsel should legal questions arise today or in the future.
To reorient us, as I described during our hearing on November 26, there were individuals at consulting firms that submitted falsified laboratory data and reports to ECMC. These consultants were hired by oil and gas operators, and we do not have information that the operators were aware of the falsifications.
For those who may be just tuning into today’s hearing and did not participate in the November 26 hearing, a recording and a press release are available on our website for context.
I asked for a meeting today because we achieved another step in the investigation today. We are sharing the locations of the impacted sites known to date to be affected and an outline of a plan of action for prioritizing and addressing those sites. At the conclusion of this hearing, we will include a map of the sites, a list of remediation projects, some context about the situation, and guidance about how to navigate our system. We’re trying to provide that in a package that’s accessible and understandable, recognizing our system and the way we do business sometimes feel unfamiliar to folks who don’t work with us day in and day out.
We are the regulatory agency in this space and will lead the investigation and oversee the cleanup of the environmental impacts affected by falsified data. Our scope is critically important but also very precise. The impact we’re looking at will vary based on the result of each location’s investigation.
We anticipate that some sites will need no change to their remediation plan, which is great news. Some sites will require adjustments to the remediation plan or perhaps reopening of closed sites. We are still working through that level of detail, and it will be a site-by-site analysis.
Operators remain responsible for implementing adjustments to the remediation plans and completing them in accordance with our act and rules. That’s our role as a regulator: to oversee and hold accountability.
Our awareness of this grew over time:
- In July and August, we were notified at a very high level that there may be some instances of data falsification.
- In September, we started to understand and take steps internally to prevent submission of future falsified data.
- In October, we began to understand the scope affected on the scale of hundreds of sites and initiated our own internal investigation.
- In November, we shared this information with the Commissioners and the public.
Our top priority is determining the risk to public health or safety. Based on our investigation to date, we remain confident that the falsified data creates no new risks to public health. This is based on our understanding that the scope of the impacted data is limited to site investigation and remediation work plans for sites that have already been disturbed by oil and gas development.
The investigation is important and the act of submitting falsified data is important. The actual environmental impact is not an emergency in our estimation. By determining that the falsified plans pertain to site investigation and remediation work plans, which are also known as our Form 27s, we determined that the data manipulation affected ground soil, ground water, inorganic, and organic contaminant data at sites that were already disturbed and under an active remediation plan.
The investigation is complex given the volume of falsified data and the degree to which the falsified data appears to be erratic and somewhat patternless. There are a number of constituents affected, and we don’t totally understand why. This underscores the importance of going to each site individually, taking a look, and taking steps necessary to ensure that the data is corrected and the site is remediated to our standards.
At this point, I would ask Kristen Kemp, our very capable Community Relations Manager, to share a map of the locations we have put together to date to help everybody orient in space and time. After this, more information will be available about these different pieces.
The map shows a mix of locations both in unincorporated Weld County and municipalities within Weld County. We have been in closer contact with local governments this past week to discuss what we understand is in their community to date and, more importantly, to set up a communication cadence going forward so that we are supporting them, their constituents, and answering any questions they may have.
Looking at the map, the yellow areas represent incorporated areas, and the gray areas represent unincorporated areas. As we said, we understand that almost all of this is in Weld County, with a couple of sites on the border with Larimer County. We’ve distinguished between closed remediation projects and open remediation projects because that’s important to us as we prioritize our workflow.
I want to reiterate that regardless of how we prioritize our work in evaluating these plans and projects, by the end of our investigation, we will look at every site. Our priority are the sites that are closed and within a municipality – which are fairly limited right now, which is great. We hope to move through those relatively quickly and then broaden out to other closed sites.
Our goal in approaching the closed sites first is that these are the ones that may be returned to the surface owner or where we may believe that no further action is needed, when in fact we do need to go back in and open, potentially revisit the physical location and have other remediation work performed.
We want to start with closed within municipalities, then other closed projects, and then move to projects that are open. The open ones are where we may see the least change in plans because they are open and the work can go on once we have updated data.
This portion of our investigation is focused on site-specific work. We are concurrently investigating the broader implications and scope of the falsified data by looking more collectively through our data. In an interesting coincidence, we just created a new QA/QC (quality assurance/quality control) team led by our esteemed colleague Mike Leonard, who many of you are familiar with from his previous role as our compliance manager.
His team will be leading an investigation into data integrity more broadly. This work may result in additional sites being added, and if so, we will continue to work closely with local governments and provide updates quarterly or more frequently if appropriate.
I want to take a moment to thank our team. They have been laser-focused on this and committed to getting the data reviewed, accurate, and available as quickly as possible, recognizing the importance of this issue to many folks. They have stepped up despite very full plates to lead this investigation.
We often find ourselves asking why this happened and why a few individuals appear to have taken such action. While that is an interesting question, it’s not the one we’re tasked with answering. Our work is to ensure compliance with our rules and regulations, which in this instance requires investigating and inspecting sites, getting them clean to our standards, and getting the data corrected.
Given our concerns about the submission of falsified data, we are cooperating with law enforcement, and this matter has been referred to prosecutors for further review, assessment, and potential investigation.
We will return no later than March with an update and will evaluate whether it’s appropriate to bring more information forward as we start getting into some of those individual projects. I also want to thank our local government partners, many of whom spent time with us yesterday. We know they are often tasked with so much, and to make time for us was deeply appreciated.
We look forward to continuing to support them through this and through other oil and gas or energy-related questions that arise in their jurisdictions.
Chair Robbins: We appreciate the report and keeping everybody up to date. I have a potential clarifying question. Can you talk to us a little bit about the work you’ve done to ensure local governments are up to speed? Frankly, I was a little disappointed with Jason Maxey in Weld County and some of the things that were in the paper about not being told and the ramifications of that. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to talk with Mr. Kavanagh, the replacement for Mr. Maxi, but would love to sort of clear the record on that front.
Julie Murphy: Thank you, Chair, for the question. I would acknowledge that our initial communication with local governments was very abrupt and rushed. We were moving quickly to get this information to the public, which compressed our time for earlier conversations.
I’ve spoken with Weld County twice this week, not counting the joint budget committee hearing before Senator Kirkmeyer. I had really productive conversations with Mr. Kavanagh and look forward to our partnership, appreciating their interest and understanding of the situation.
We identified that two of the impacted sites are actually just on the Larimer County side of the Weld-Larimer border, so we also reached out and had a conversation with Larimer County earlier this week. Our goal is to share information, support them, establish a communication cadence, and be responsive and available.
Chair Robbins: It sounds like you feel comfortable in the intergovernmental relationship with the various affected local governments and that you and your team are doing everything you can to ensure transparency, understanding, and the ability to react if issues arise.
Julie Murphy: Yes, that’s correct.
Chair Robbins: The other thing we were reading about was a conundrum: our agency relies on accurate transmission of information from the operators we regulate. What sorts of efforts are being explored to ensure that the information transmitted to us is indeed accurate? I recall there were a couple hundred places out of 6,000, so in the grand scheme of things, the percentage is small, but we want to make sure everything’s accurate.
Julie Murphy: In September, we started adjusting how we ask for information on the Form 27. We now request a standalone PDF to be included with the form, which allows our team to examine the metadata to understand if it was manipulated.
We think this is a good start to course correction. We look forward to Mr. Leonard’s team investigating if there are other vulnerabilities we should address. The core principle is that our work, like any regulated entity, is rooted in the basic assumption that people obey the laws. It is disheartening when we uncover something like this.
Chair Robbins: Having been with the commission now almost six years and having been director for a bit, I can’t think of a better person to help run this than Mike Leonard, who’s been with our commission in probably every capacity available. He really understands this information, and I have a tremendous amount of trust in him and his team to figure this out, get it right, and chart a good go-forward plan.
Chair Robbins: Are there any other questions from Commissioners? Seeing no questions, that means you did a great job. Thanks for the update. We’ll look forward to continued updates on this important topic. We appreciate the diligence of our ECMC team in working through this unexpected development.