In response to public comment made during their October 29th meeting, Ellice Devine, ECMC UIC Program Coordinator gave an update on data issues discovered in produced water reporting.
In Summary:
- Reporting inconsistencies discovered: While reviewing Form 7 produced water reports (required since September 2023), staff found operators reporting disposal at closed facilities, abandoned locations, spill/release IDs, and lease IDs, none of which are appropriate disposal locations.
- Root cause identified: The errors appear most common among operators using commercial UIC facilities, likely because commercial operators reroute produced water based on logistics without communicating changes back to the producing operators.
- No safety concerns: The misreported volumes represent “a minute fraction of total disposal volumes”, and this is “purely a data reporting problem”.
- Corrective actions planned: ECMC will modify business rules to alert or prevent submission of incorrect facility IDs, update guidance documentation, contact operators to request corrections to existing data, and may pursue enforcement action for non-compliance.
- Quality assurance success: Commissioner Messner praised this as an example of effective quality control for Colorado’s relatively new (less than 2 years old) and potentially nation-leading produced water reporting requirements.
Chair: All right. We have one other agenda item. I would say let’s plow through and get it done. It’s the staff presentation on produced water data issues. Good morning.
Ellice Devine: Good morning. Good morning, Commissioners. It’s an honor to be here with you today. My name is Ellice Devine. I’m the UIC or underground injection control program coordinator here, and it’s an honor to speak to produced water reporting data accuracy. So, I’m going to share my screen. Can you all see the presentation?
Chair: Yes.
Ellice Devine: Okay, perfect. So I just want to start by saying I don’t review or approve monthly production reports, but the information in the reports is beneficial to engineering staff. So in the UIC world I frequently use the information on the Form 7 monthly report to ensure that UIC operators remain within their permitted injection volume and pressure limits. And I also use information on another form that we actually do review and approve called the Form 26 source of produced water report, which operators submit to report any producing wells that may provide produced water for disposal at their facilities.
I find that the Form 7 reporting changes associated with produced water recycling and reuse present a wonderful opportunity to learn more about where the water is being transported on a monthly basis. And not only that, it allows us to have more information about the volumes being transported and injected, which helps us gain a better understanding of the relationships between producing wells and UIC wells.
Since September 2023, as you know, operators have been required to submit the following volumes on a monthly basis. So they’re reporting fresh water used downhole, recycled and reused produced water downhole, if the water is produced from the well and removed for disposal or produced and recycled on location or off of the location. These are all of the things that are now required of operators on a monthly basis.
Operators are also required to provide the disposal method, and that can include Class 1 or Class 2 commercial wells, commercial disposal wells, and those non-commercial facilities owned by that same operator, and they may include water floods or UIC disposal at centralized ECMC waste management facilities. You can also have a disposal method of discharge into surface waters in accordance with a CDPHE permit. On-site pits are used and also commercial waste disposal facilities without underground injection can be disposal methods. Finally, operators must report the disposal location, and that is what I’ll be focusing my discussion on today.
So, circling back to my role, as a part of my routine monitoring for compliance, I decided to modify my approach and compare the information on the Form 7 produced water report with the information on the Form 26. And I did that to basically ensure timely reporting of the sources of produced water. And it was during my data collection that I discovered some inconsistencies regarding the disposal location. And that’s what I’m going to speak to today. So I want to share those instances with you.
Inconsistencies Found
We’ve noticed that some operators have reported volumes at locations that have been closed. And so a closed facility is a facility that no longer contains operational equipment. It is not an active facility and it is not capable of disposing of produced water. And looking further into the data, it appears that this is most prevalent among those producing operators who utilize commercial UIC facilities for disposal. And we suspect that this is occurring because the producing operator may not know exactly where their produced water is going. Commercial operators tend to reroute the produced water via truck or pipeline based on logistics or operational parameters such as injection volumes and pressures, and updates may not be communicated to the producing operator.
We’ve also noticed that operators have reported volumes at locations that have been abandoned. Now, abandoned locations were never active and should not be listed on a Form 7 as a disposal location.
Operators have also used spill or release facility IDs as water disposal locations. And a spill or release facility ID is created when an operator reports a spill to the ECMC. And this identification number allows operators to submit subsequent information and documentation regarding the spill release. So we do not expect this to be used as a water disposal location.
We found instances where operators have entered facility IDs associated with leases as produced water disposal locations as well. And some of these leases contain abandoned wells or they’re in areas where there is no oil and gas activity at all. So the use of a lease ID on a Form 7 should not be used and it is not a preferred method according to the Form 7 produced water form instructions.
Now outside of underground injection there are those facilities that I mentioned earlier where there is disposal but it’s just not injected. And these facilities, what we’ve noticed is that there is a particular code that operators are using. Now, I want to be clear and say that these treatment facilities may use some sort of surface discharge or something to that effect, but our form guidance and our Excel templates are specific about the kinds of facility ID that should be used in this report. However, regarding disposal in Colorado, we noticed that some operators have used a code that is not found in our guidance and it is not found in our template. So, I thought I would include that as a part of the discussion as well.
Context and Next Steps
But I want to say that although we’ve noticed these inconsistencies and in my data analysis I found that the associated volumes are but a minute fraction of the total volume of water disposal reported. And I also want to point out that there is no indication of any kind of safety or welfare concerns or improper disposal associated with these discrepancies. We believe that this is an issue with misreporting. And so we understand that there are corrections that need to be made.
And so to start, we as ECMC staff, we plan to determine what business rules may need to be modified to at the very least inform operators by an error message alerting them when they have entered an ID that corresponds to any of the instances that I’ve already discussed. And another consideration is actually preventing operators from being able to submit the Form 7 if they have entered such an identification number. But we’re still exploring our options there.
So after we modify the business rules, then we would of course have to update our guidance to provide operators with clear instruction on how to report and what to look for. And once these actions have taken place, ECMC staff does intend to contact operators about the inconsistencies that we found and encourage them to submit corrections for the existing data that is in our system, and failure to comply with that may result in enforcement action.
So we believe by implementing these actions through error prevention and retroactive corrections that we would help increase data accuracy and ensure accuracy moving forward and further support the produced water efforts. So that is all I have. Are there any questions this morning?
Chair: Thank you for the presentation. Very informative information. Commissioner’s questions for Miss Devine? Commissioner Messner.
Commissioner Messner: Thanks Miss Devine. Thank you for providing that information and being proactive and continuing to evaluate and verify information that’s being provided by operators. And I think that is a good example of how the agency continues its quality control and quality assurance protocols for a reporting regime that’s relatively new, right? And so I think this has been in place less than two years, these reporting requirements, and are actually reporting requirements that may be unique in the nation as far as the volumes and locations and transportation mechanisms and emissions from those transportation mechanisms. And so this is not easy stuff to do. And appreciate you, you know, continuing to refine and improve the processes to make sure that operators understand the expectations and are complying with the expectations that are that are required as part of these rules. And so I think this is a good example of quality control and quality assurance working right. And so appreciate you providing that information to us and to the world in a very transparent way. So thanks.
Ellice Devine: Thank you.
Chair: Good comments. Other questions, comments? All right, we will let you get back to work. Thanks so much for reporting to us this morning.