 Well, welcome everybody to the first educational event sponsored by the Longmont climate community. This will be a three part series starting today with what is in our air. My name is Karen Dyke and as someone who developed asthma after I retired here. It is a subject that's pretty constantly on my mind. Please pose any questions you have in the Q&A section. Enter them as you think of them and we will answer as many as possible today after the session, and we'll answer others by emailing the responses after the webinar. We will also watch the chat section if you have technology issues or have something additional you would like us to know, but the Q&A section will be best. So, we are ready for our first speaker, but his technology isn't quite up to par, but our first speaker is. I'm very pleased to welcome him, Dr. Detlef Helmig. Dr. Helmig is a well known and respected research scientist with over 200 published peer review articles, and is also editor in chief of the atmospheric sciences domain, Elementa. Dr. Helmig is on international committees studying climate, and even has a couple of patents. We all know him best as the founder of the Boulder Atmosphere Innovation, and for monitoring pollution related to the fossil fuel industry here in the northern front range area. So, Dr. Helmig, his camera won't work for some reason, but he can share screen so we'll let him start. Yes, thanks for the introduction. Good to be on this symposium. I apologize for this technical issue here. I assume you can hear me now and can you see my screen? Yes. Okay, good. So that most of the most important parts. So, yeah, I want to give you an update on what we've been doing and I've presented. Overviews of this air monitoring program on quite a few occasions over the last year. So many of you may have seen this presentation or parts of it. I tried to put a few new things in there, but there's only so much that it's new. I'm not having given this similar presentation just a couple months ago to the city council. So let me walk you through this here. Okay, there we go. So I've picked three topics, just a quick introduction of the air quality monitoring program that's ongoing. And then what do the data tell us about remissions releases from oil and gas operations and that's a focus of this symposium here and the impact on air quality. And then what can we tell from the data about how effective changes in regulations have been. So let's get started on that. And I'm going to show you data from a total of four different monitoring locations. There are a few more by now in the region. I'm going to show you where they are on this map here in relation to all the gas well sites which are all these these brownish dots here. I'm going to show you data from Nibbaud Ridge, which is up in the mountains of the peak to peak highway for comparison. And then we have both side of the region and then observations on the border reservoir data from the two long one sites one is at the airport in Western Longmont and then at the Union Reservoir, which I think most of you know the best. These are how these monitoring programs look the two sites in Longmont, the left one is the one at the airport, and we started there operating in September 2019 so I have about a year and a half of data now. The one on the right is this site at the Union Reservoir. It's also been running for well over a year now. They run both continuously around the clock, recording all these different variables that are listed underneath. And then the data gets pushed to a web portal that reports all these measurements both in tables and in graphical format for everybody to see and follow current air quality conditions. To give you an idea how things look here in the front range compared to when you step outside of the front range, what I selected here is a comparison of one of these gases we measure and this is ethane and we really like ethane because it's a really nice selective tracer compound for oil and gas emissions since ethane is not really released from other sources at significant amounts so ethane gives us a very good signal of indicator you know how much do we get from oil and gas observations. So that compares ethane measured at Nibaut-Rich up in the mountains that's in the bottom trace and at the Boda Reservoir which is in the upper trace and both of these are at the same scales so the same concentration range and you can see this is really really different. As you see at the Boda Reservoir down here in the plains there's lots of spikes, ups and downs, ups and downs all year round and it gets a little bit heavier in the winter, the higher peaks are mostly in the winter and you don't see that outside of the region. But then these spikes come down again, you know they come down and down and down all the time. So the important thing to note here is that we are subjected in the front range to these spikes. These are spikes or plumes, plumes that travel over the area and that have elevated concentrations of these oil and gas VOCs and they can last depending on where you are anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours sometimes maybe half a day or so. So we have an environment that's abundant with these concentration spikes. And so, you know you saw the difference between the Boda Reservoir and Nibaut-Rich. And now this shows the difference between the Boda Reservoir and the Longmont Union Reservoir. The Boda Reservoir looked really high with lots of spikes, lots of peaks compared to Nibaut-Rich. This comparison now shows that at Longmont, there's even more spikes or mostly higher spikes than what you see at the Boda Reservoir. You can see at the map up there that the Union Reservoir side is quite a bit closer to where the well density gets really, really tight and there's lots of them, much more wells, closer proximity. So that, you know, gives us an indication that, you know, the further you move into the core of the oil and gas development area, the more of these spikes you get and the higher the concentrations are. So this was ethane and there's many people who are interested and concerned about benzene. So that's the same slide comparing the data for benzene. Again, left the Boda Reservoir and on the right side the Longmont Union Reservoir. And you can see there's quite a higher number and again higher concentrations in benzene that we observe at the Union Reservoir through the whole year. So this is four years of data, roughly. Now, this is something quite remarkable that we observed this year. Again, this is ethane at the Longmont Union Reservoir. So you can see on the right side of the graph. Eight, nine thousand measurements in here taken over a year. So there were a couple of occurrences earlier this year in January and February where concentrations got really, really high. You know, so the background is something like one or two parts per billion for ethane. And it gets way higher than that. It actually gets so high that it saturated our measurement system. So we had to, you know, the actual concentrations would actually be above what's covered in this graph here. So I have the dates here. The first one was on January 6. The second one was on February 1, 2021. And they were very short, but very high extreme concentrations. And I want to look at that a little bit more. These are the plumes that were encountered at the Union Reservoir. Very short lasting, as I said, and this compares different pollutants in this plume. So what I want to communicate here to you is that when we see these plumes, these spikes, we never just see just one pollutant, one contaminant by itself. It's always a mixture. There's many of these VOCs together in this, you know, it's like a split piece. There's lots of things in there. They come together and you can see this in the graphs here, the spike at methane, ethane, propane, butane, benzene. So all of these went up together when these plume events happened. Now that zooms into the first of these occurrences on January 6. And this now is much, much finer time scale. So if you look at the left graph, you can see this captures rather, this captures around an hour of data. And this uses the measurements from the methane sensor. And that's a very, very fast sensor that can measure at four second time resolution, actually. And you can see when this spike happened, it was very dynamic concentrations went up and down, up and down, and the background is two and it went all the way to 25. Within a few minutes bounced around, and then it came down again and it was back again. So the nature of these these plumes is that they are short. And they come with extremely elevated concentrations. And like now this zooms into this even further. That now captures the measurement of the ethane in the sample or it's listed here as volatile organic compounds. I'm going to show that that, you know, as you evaluate these these pollution plumes and data you may see, you've got to understand how these pollutants are measured. As you can see, we can only usually measure a 10 minute average. And so we average over this 10 minute window. And you can see if you take the mean of this, this plume it's actually much lower than these these peak concentrations that we can capture with the methane sensor. So what factors into all of this is how fast can you actually measure what what do you have in your tool chest to capture this pollution film. And here is just an exercise I use the methane measurements at one minute time resolution in the top, where we're lucky that we have this fast method measurement. But if you have an instrument that only measures every five minutes, it's the second trace and you can see the, the peak is not nearly as high. The average 10 minutes it gets flatter an hour below gets flatter. And if you measure average over half a day 12 hours that peak almost disappears. So there's quite a few monitoring programs out there that don't have the capability of this fast response measurement. So those may be collected average over three hours some of the states canister sampling is three hours, some sampling goes over three days integrated sampling. So you will never see never notice these spikes, unless you have an instrument in your hands that allows these very, very fast measurements so in nature of this pollution. And the way we see it here is such that, you know, it's these short occurrences, very dynamic, very high concentration increases. And to become aware of that, you really need to have a monitoring approach that allows you to capture these short term episodic pollution events. What we've done here is, I look at these two events, January 6 and February 1. And do some scaling and corrections for, you know, I mentioned to you that our sensor was for saturated but we have a way to get around this to estimate the actual concentration spikes that we had during that event. And that gets us to two levels that listed here from methane, ethylene benzene in the orange box, our estimated concentrations that are very significantly above the background. The background is to the right of that. And if you compare that you get to the what I call an enhancement factor on the very right that shows you how many times the peak concentrations in these plumes were above the background. The first thing, the first event, we come to factor of 12. For ethane, the estimate that the concentration were about 1000 to 3000 times higher than the background for benzene was 60 to 160 times higher at the peak time of the background. And the events of these two big peaks were similar, ethane was, you know, between 5000 and 3500 times higher benzene between 20 and 120 times higher than what we typically see in the background. So you can see this is a very substantial increase in the levels of these pollutants than what we normally see under clean conditions. So let's take a look at how it looked at things look like at the Union Reservoir when this happened. This is the image from the webcam so there's a webcam there taking pictures every 15 minutes and restore those and then if you see something unusual we go back and look them up. So this is the first event on January 9. Nice morning, winter morning, you know, reservoir is frozen, it looks clean, you know, you could never tell. There's this very high extreme pollution plume traveling over the reservoir and this actually looks into the direction where that plume originated. And if you look at the winds associated to this plume, we can roughly estimate it what the source of this release must have been and it's mostly within most likely within this reddish shaded area. It's, you know, a little bit of uncertainty on both ends. But our best estimate is that this originated somewhere within that, that pie slice there that's shaded in this reddish colored tone. So this is the first event, the second event on February 1st. It's similar here. It happened in the morning. And it looked very similar clump conditions, not much wind. Couldn't tell from the image and looking at the wind direction here, we come to a similar conclusion again it came from the east, maybe a little bit further to the north but you know within the uncertainty of the wind measurements. And it did overlap reasonably well. Now looking at the combined sources, source sector of these plumes. We think it most likely originated from the area that's in between these two red lines here. And you can see from the yellow dots, you know, there's quite a few possible locations or locations where this may have originated from. We don't know with our data, which one it potentially was that could have been one even further out. That's not even on this, this section of the map that we pulled out. But, you know, if you look at, you know, the candidates that would be the closers and look at the distance, you know, what's really nice here is we know to the east. You know, there's the reservoir for a mile or something so that there's no well within the reservoir. So you have to go quite a bit further to get to these, you know, this would be the closest well so you can see that well over 10,000 feet distance and maybe the less you know we see enhancements that are, you know, 1000 times plus above the background as these plumes travel across the landscape in the winter to compare that with the current setbacks we have in Colorado which is 2000 feet and around the county increased it to 2500 feet. You know, these, these well sides are well beyond the current setbacks so that the message here is, you know, even with the current setbacks under these type of conditions and circumstances, you know, you may still well encounter plumes with concentration enhancements that, you know, are as high as what we saw here in these in the stator. And that thing to consider is, you know, they're they're residential neighborhoods, there's a school that are significantly closer to any of these potential wells, you know, we saw these enhancement factor of 1000 more than 10,000 feet away. And, you know, if the wind swivels, and, and there's similar type of releases, you know, you would expect that any of these is populated neighborhoods or the school would be subjected to similar or potentially even higher concentrations within these neighborhoods. Okay, so this by first summary. So, you know, exposure is largely determined by occurrence of short concentration spikes to show to you these these two examples. And also you are to the operations, the more spikes and the higher peak values. We typically see these these highly concentrated emissions can travel and maintain these highly these these concentration levels for much further than current setbacks. And what's, you know, we are kind of in a special situation here, given the topography the meteorological conditions with the elevation the surface cooling the cold winters we had. So, you know, this is something of cold air. Like low level inversions you might put that term and that really fosters the accumulation of these pollutants, and it suppresses the mixing so they can stay at this high concentration levels for quite some distance and travel across the landscape, especially in the winter when it's cold and there's snow on the ground. So a few more things to look at, because, you know, if you ask, can you see anything given, you know, there's been some new regulations and especially one that wasn't active just on January 15. So this is summary from the CPI G website that lists updates on oil and gas regulations and there's a lot of information and a lot of changes over the years. If you follow any of these links to get all the details. One particular one, when I look at here is the one that it wasn't active as I said in January, and that's prohibits venting and flaring of natural gas. So, you know, without the venting and flaring, which we think is a major cause of these these plumes, you know, we would expect a decline in the observation of these these plumes that we see. So let's let's take a look at the data do we see anything do we see any change. Very early, but what I put out here is the ethnic record from the voter reservoir where we have data for three more years and what we have at the Union reservoir so far. So you can see there's four years of data into the very right. I've highlighted the period after January 15. Since flaring and venting has been prohibited. You know, there's still a firm number of spikes, you know, I don't see a very dramatic decrease in the frequency and the, the height of the spikes, you could argue that over the four year record, maybe there's been a somewhat decline in the, the, the, the height of these concentration spikes. But overall, you know, it seems to be about the same as it's been before. So moving on this we're trying to evaluate this, you know, quantitatively how effective are the regulations and one of the ways to do this. I want to show here. So again, this is the comparison voter reservoir versus and I bought rich. You can see on the top it bounces around all the spikes at the bottom it's it's much more level. So these statistical analysis on the right side in this that's called box whisker plots, you know, that shows the spread of the data. And you can see a site that's near a pollution source we have a lot of these spikes combinations the data are spread far apart. When it's cleaner, you know the spread is much, much smaller. So what we do now is we look at it that spread has changed. How does it move from this widespread, you know, large difference between these different percentile values to where it is a more narrow distribution. So we can do this with the data we have. This shows the monthly data and for the voter reservoir. More almost four years now. And, you know, this is been by month, given the levels go up and down every year from winter and the summer to do this properly. But the problem way to do this is to compare the same month of every year so you can't really compare January with March or June. So just to show you why we're doing what I'm doing here is so we compare this the spread of the data for a given month across the record we have. So this is again for the voter reservoir. It shows the data from 2017 to 2021 for January, February, March and April. Now February and March and April are after the January 15th implementation of the venting and flaring ordinance. So if you look at the distribution in the data for everything here, you know, has the distribution become more narrow. Have the extreme values become fewer, which are all these dots on top of the whiskers, you know, they show you the very, very extreme readings. You know, so if you look at the February data is 2021 different than the prior years. I don't think there's a strong reason to argue for that same for March, April, maybe you know the April looks like it may be coming down a little bit. But that's where we are, you know, that's what we're doing. That's what we have in our hands to examine if and how effective the regulations have been and if you do indeed see a change in improvement, a lower abundance of frequencies of these events. So that's my second summary. We do see at the Union Reservoir, a reduction or a lower number of spikes between 20 and 21 I didn't go into that in depth. But that's probably a change in practices brought at nearby world sites and I've presented that a couple times before. But from the longer term data from the Boda Reservoir that we have, there's not a strong argument should be made at this point that emissions and transport from the Denver Julesburg space and has dropped significantly as a whole. There may be a slight signature in there. But so far, we don't see a very obvious change in occurrence of these concentration spikes after the implementation of the Senate bill 1981, which as I said became an effective in January 15. So we're honored to keep our eyes open and you know hopefully with more data coming in over the next six months over the summer. We all will have some more concrete findings to present on that particular question. So that's my last slide. And with that I hand back over to I think Karen or Mitzi. Yeah. Thank you, Dr. Helme. I think every time I hear Dr. Helme speak I learned something really new. So thank you so much. Next we have one of our team. Mitzi Nicoletti is has some area photos from the Union Reservoir that we thought would be interesting to all of you. Mitzi. Yes, good afternoon. I'm going to get my slides going. Good afternoon. I'm going to be showing some slides to y'all that are photos that highlight activities that contribute to poor air quality stemming from the area in and around Union Reservoir Laumont. This slide I took actually last year this is Union Reservoir. Really pretty day out there. And Union Reservoir was actually constructed on top of a natural spring fed lake called Cockens Lake Now Union. The reservoir was carved out during the last glacial age, and is one of the only few spring fed natural lakes in Colorado. The northwest side of Union is one of our air quality monitoring systems, and Dead Lib had talked about that. So this is last year. This picture was taken on April 30th this year at 643 AM. This is a picture of the Nightwell pad. It's an active drilling site. This picture was taken by a rower that was on the water and happened to capture this with the birds in front of it. So the Nightwell is on the northwest corner of Union Reservoir and is 500 feet off the shore. This picture was taken on May 5th at 530 AM. And this is a good example of flaring. We figure this flame is at least 60 feet. And the other thing is you can see the smoke coming off this flame. If you notice to the left of this flame, excuse me, to the left of this flame, look how close those houses are. And then you can also see how close you are to the water. The next picture I have is another one on May 12th at 6 AM, another flame. This particular picture was taken, like I said, at 6 AM. And what we're noticing, this is occurring at least once a week, if not more. And you remember the first picture I showed you of Union last year and then this is the picture I'm showing you today. I believe the Nightwell is contributing in a negative way to our air quality. I am very fond of this area and have always loved Union like I believe a lot of us do. The next picture shows the Nightwell how close it is to this house. The next few pictures are just going to show how much I think we all enjoy Union reservoir. I took this picture last weekend. This is a couple sitting out actually fishing. And this picture is just various families out enjoying a Sunday afternoon. You know, people fish, they paddle board this particular day, there were no paddle boards. It was too windy. This is a picture of actually me and my boat. I love being out on that water is a lot of people do. The morning is just such a great time to be out there. I was out on the water this morning. And I was with a bunch of people in about 825. In the morning I kept hearing this, it sounded like a release. And I was right by the Nightwell so I stayed there for at least five minutes and listen to this sound. They kept coming off until about 10 or 15 minutes later it stopped. When I got home I went to the bold air website just to see what was taking place at that time and what I noticed during that window of about an hour, the butane benzene and ethane spite. And then my last picture is one of my favorite friends, the hawk. There's a lot of wonderful birds around Union as there are all over Longmont. Our next speaker will go into more detail of what is being recorded in our air within our city. Karen. Yeah. Thank you, Mitzi. They say pictures worth a thousand words. So, you know, we certainly have good evidence there. Next up, we have more photos in the form of some FLIR photography presented by Andrew Closter. Andrew is Colorado Field Advocate with Earthworks. It's an environmental nonprofit that works with frontline communities nationally and internationally to advocate for stronger regulations and transition away from extractive mining and fossil fuel industries. Andrew's from Michigan and was a political organizer and environmental educator in Cleveland, Ohio before moving to Denver and joining Earthworks in 2020. He's worked for numerous environmental nonprofit conducted climate change research with real communities in the upper Midwest and in Nicaragua, and is also a certified demographer. He currently leads Earthworks oil and gas fieldwork in the state of Colorado. Andrew. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Let me get my screen up. Cool. Everyone can see this. Awesome. So as Karen said, my name is Andrew Closter. I'm the Colorado field advocate with Earthworks. And I'm going to try to be as quick as possible to move through my slides today so we can have some time at the end for question and answers. I'm presenting on our oil and gas fieldwork findings from around the Union Reservoir in the period of January to May of this year. And before I really get into the actual findings, just in case there's folks on today who don't know what Earthworks is, they don't know what we mean when we say the word fieldwork when we are referring to fieldwork what we do when we visit oil and gas sites is you'll see the image. On the right that wonky looking camera that is the OGI optical gas imaging camera these are specially designed industry standard cameras that can help us see permit us to see pollutants that are not visible to the naked eye and so what the regulators at the state agencies and the EPA use these are what the operators themselves use to detect leaks on their site and the pollutants that were specifically kind of looking at with this camera are as debt live kind of outlined in his presentation are methane and volatile organic compounds. That's what we're seeing coming off of oil and gas sites primarily. These bullets on the slide kind of walk through the process by which we go through our fieldwork. So Earthworks likes to partner with frontline community members people who are living in these areas of high heavy oil and gas development, and we identify through their experience sites that are concerning to them whether it's because of odors they smell their health symptoms, or just because they're in close proximity to home schools parks what have you. We go out we look at the sites from a safe distance we never intrude or trespass on operator property. And if we expose any sort of concerning emissions if we see something coming off the site that seems significant or potentially concerning, we follow up with complaints to the appropriate regulatory agencies at the state level which is primarily the Colorado health and environment as they have jurisdiction over air quality but we also will sometimes file complaints with the Colorado oil and gas conservation commission. So I'm just going to really quickly breeze over the slide because I know the next webinar in the series is really specifically about health impacts and the impacts of oil and gas, but just to provide some additional context about why when we're in a site and those emissions are potentially a combination of methane and volatile organic compounds why we're concerned about those for methane in particular it's because, as a greenhouse gas, it's much much more potent and worse than carbon dioxide while it's in the atmosphere. And for volatile organic compounds are concerned is primarily for those nearby are those in the direction of the plumes of emissions in terms of the range of health impacts that may result from breathing in the benzene and some of these other volatile organic compounds and that can range from possible respiratory illnesses to cancers and that stat at the bottom I think is an important one to highlight it's a little out of date right now that's based on 2010 census data. But as of 2010 250,000 Coloradans lived within a half mile of an active oil and gas site, and that half mile is important as that live kind of highlighted a bit with the setback distance because that's really the minimally safe distance at which current research has shown potential impacts if you're within that half mile but as you know that live showed in his presentation, there's that's not a hard and fast rule and wind direction geology. The direction of the plume can impact that but if we're just going by half mile radius is there's a significant amount of Coloradans who are being impacted by these sites and that number is, unfortunately probably much higher now given that we've had quite a bit of population growth in the last 10 years. One last slide before I jump directly into the Longmont stuff as an overview of our field work in general in Colorado. We've conducted just over 400 visits to almost 250 different oil and gas facilities and this ranges from single well kind of vertical well pump your traditional pump jacks to the giant mega 20 plus well pads like the one we've had that Mitzi highlighted. We've also looked at midstream facilities tank storage facilities, and every type of facility we've looked at regardless of size regardless of production level, we've detected emissions, and not at every facility but at every type of facility and the types of emissions that we detect one of the things I want to highlight and I think one of the main takeaways from my presentation today is these sorts of emissions. The ones that you know that live pointed out. There's the flaring and venting issue they and they can occur for a variety of reasons we can see emissions coming from tanks, which may be venting it may be leaks. There can also be emissions from other equipment on site, including the wellhead or other equipment where there's leaks. There can be emissions due to inefficient or malfunctioning combustors on the site. During different stages of a well's life cycle. There can be different emissions levels and the pre production phase of wells, especially big fracking pads like the one we've had are typically emissions heavy stages of a well's life when they're in the fracking and flow back stages. And we've also detected emissions due to maintenance events routine maintenance events that may be occurring on sites where they have to relieve the pressure in the well and they either do that by venting the gases directly into the atmosphere or flaring trying to burn off combust some of those gases. And that can lead to emissions as well. So, you know, a quick summation conclusion of this is that, you know, our, our broadly from our field work what we can demonstrate is that no oil and gas facility is potentially not at some point in its life going to be polluting or having emissions heavy event. And that's just something I want everyone to keep in mind that regardless of the size or again the production level. It's a pervasive and persistent issue we find with filming these sites and seeing emissions from these sites. And that last statistic at the bottom is also I think really important that of these little over 400 visits we've done almost 100 of them so a quarter have resulted in us filing complaints because of the admissions that we have seen on site. So, I'm going to move now into the long month specific data. So we've taken in part response to some of the air monitoring what that lives air monitoring is picking up. We have done to sort of concerted looks at well sites around the reservoir, and I've also followed up a few times over the last couple of months as well. In January we took a look at a number of sites. I have them in the as pins on this map, the ones that are read our sites where we detected significant emissions are significant enough to kind of take note of I should say. In the south, those are the Cub Creek Haley pad which is north of 66 there. The PDC Union site which is just there on the south shore of the Union Reservoir, and then extractions RIN Valley site which is just south of sandstone ranch county road 20 and a half. And in March, we did another concerted sort of look at sites we focused a little bit more you'll notice on sites to the east of the reservoir, but also looked at some of the same sites again and you know you'll immediately notice that the three that I highlighted and read in January we're also highlighted in March because we detected emissions significant enough emissions to take note of again at those three sites, and then we added to others that list, most significantly I think being the night pad, which is the one if just north of the reservoir south of 66 that Mitzi showed pictures of and I'll have additional visuals of a little bit later. Again, for those who may not have seen earthworks is work and how we present this stuff the next couple of slides the majority of my presentation is going to show on the left hand side of your the slide you're going to see a digital photo that's the naked eye view of this site on that day at that time. On the right hand side, you're going to see an animated gift a clip from our OGI footage that shows hopefully about the same angle it's about the same time that the photo was taken to demonstrate the fact that these pollutants that come off of these sites in the form of hydrocarbons that we can't see them we cannot perceive them with our naked eye but the OGI camera can see them and that's what it's designed to do. So this is the PDC Union site, this is the one that as I mentioned is just on the south shore the Union reservoir, and I should make a quick note about combusted sources and so this is a combusted source that we're seeing these are emissions from a combusted source. This, I talked about us filing complaints based on the emissions that we find it can be a little hard with combusted sources there's some ambiguity because, to a certain extent, operators are allowed and permitted to pollute a certain amount of pollutants and you know when they're combusting excess natural gas that operation is never going to be 100% efficient. So there's going to be some emissions that occur. These combusted sources are supposed to be much more efficient than alternatives, and they definitely are more efficient than venting directly into the atmosphere. However, when we have questions about emissions coming from combusted sources typically unless we can definitively prove that the combustor was not lit. There are kind of inquiries to the CDPHE don't really typically go anywhere simply because the operators are taken at their word for whether or not these devices are operating as efficiently or effectively as they should be. And that doesn't even really take into consideration the fact which I think is important to consider as I walk through some of these other combusted sources. And then which are not necessarily things that we would file complaints on because they may not be not they may be permissible is that what is permitted for a single well site does not at the moment really take into account the cumulative impacts of all the surrounding sites. So what one well site may be permitted to pollute is being kind of permitted in isolation of everything else and we all know in the front range, our regional air quality is not great and oil and gas has a huge major factor in that. And a lot of that has to do with the cumulative impacts of all of these sites and even again if they're within if they're in their permitted limits of pollutants, they're still contributing overall to a regional problem. So this was from January you'll see again that combustor there's some emissions coming off of it. In March, we looked at the PDC energy union site again this is from a different angle I'm pretty sure that's the same combustor though and at once again you see some emissions coming off of that combustor. You to the extraction ring Valley site, if you recall from the map this is the one that was south of sandstone ranch. You see again three combustors in a row, the one on the left hand side has a plume of emissions coming off of it. This one I would characterize as much more concerning as the last two videos given given just the characteristics of this plume given how it's drifting off site. I have not heard back from the CDPHE on this specific video but I have suspicions that this combustor may not be operating as efficiently as it should be, just given how much of that seems to be carrying off and is not being burnt off. And then one last slide in terms of combusted sources this is the Cub Creek Haley pad again if you recall, the furthest north one north of county road 66. There's a lot of those combustors going off. And I should also mention in kind of relation to debt lives work, I would, unless it's a really poorly, it's a really inefficient or malfunctioning combustor combustor, I would expect that these would not be the sorts of things that would necessarily lead to the plumes the spikes, given that this is kind of just background pollution on some of these sites that's going on continuously as they're burning off excess gas. So this next, this next type of emission I'm going to highlight could be so this we're going back to the extraction ring Valley site this is set back from where those combustors were. When we filmed this in January, we were really concerned about this video and because it looks as if that tank is just venting directly into the atmosphere, which it indeed is. So I'll highlight with the CDP he they conducted an investigation, unfortunately, or fortunately I guess depending on where you've land on this this, it was a permitted venting activity, and this is because they were performing maintenance on this site so they were doing a liquids unloading event, they had to relieve pressure in the well, and in order to relieve pressure in the well they just were venting the excess gas into the atmosphere. So, again, kind of brings up the point that while this may be permitted, this is, you know, they have to relieve the pressure so they have to vent, according to the regulations. If you live, which you can't see if this video were to keep panning there's a farmhouse, not too far from where we were standing there's you can see in the background barns and homes. If you live in this area it's not much consolation to find out that this is a permitted venting activity because that's a plume of emissions that is coming off of that tank. And we're learning, as we learn more about some of these maintenance activities I my mind I go to the community of Erie right now that some of this is much more frequent I think than any of us realize these liquids unloading events some of these wells potentially are doing this on a bi weekly basis and so if these are the emissions we can expect every time they're doing maintenance events like this, that raises some alarm bells is particularly very, very concerning. Now focusing a bit on the night pad which mitzi already shared some pictures of, as I mentioned in my little overview during pre production phases of wells. When they're in their drilling fracking phases is typically a time when we do see very significant emission events. As we detected emissions coming from behind the sound wall of the night pad and you can actually see in the image on the left these were visible emissions, not just not just something that I mean we really didn't even need the OGI camera to see them. We subsequently have learned that this was due to an inefficient flair on site the COGCC had inspected it. The flare on site was not efficient and was not appropriate for what the gas that they needed to burn off, and was not burning off the gas. As you can see with the emissions. This has been corrected for according to my follow up with the investigation and they have a much they have a more appropriate combustor on site to burn off more of this gas and reduce the amount of emissions, which is in part potentially the shooting flames that you saw in mitzi's photos. In a sense, potentially, you know we're seeing a more efficient the flames are still concerning but if there's less emissions if they're burning off more that is hopefully a positive outcome, however, the night pad is definitely not off the hook because I just as of last week was out looking at the pad in the evening I think last Thursday evening, and I detected as you can see in this gift it's a little hard because it's two photos clip together and the one gets a little washed out as I try to pan across the plume of emissions, but this is behind the sound wall that I picked up are definitely not from the combustor this is a completely different source on site and as you can see in the photos, these are 100% hydrocarbons not visible pollutants at all. This was, you know, I'm just got this gift actually ready for this presentation so I have not been able to follow up and file additional sorts of complaints or inquiries with the CDPHC and COGCC but I will be doing so. And this is particularly concerning giving that they are supposedly investigating this are inspecting the site pretty frequently, and they've already corrected for some of the issues with the flare. Again, though this is a completely different source, not a combusted source on site. I was going to share a quick video just to give another example of how bad some of these emissions events can be during pre production but I want to save some time so I'm not going to share that. And this is actually not from the long, this is from the video would have been from 2018 in the eerie from the coyote trails extraction coyote trails pad. If you're interested in any of our videos, I'll just say we have a YouTube playlist for our earthworks Colorado videos and you can go and horrify yourself by playing through our playlist of videos in the state of Colorado. Then one last thing just really quickly I want to run through as another example another type of emissions that we should all be concerned about. This is also not from Longmont but I want to include it because it's a really illustrative example of a major problem that we find in Colorado when we're doing our field work, which is leaks and the persistence and pervasiveness of leaks so this site is actually north of Fort Collins and Larimer County. We visited it for the very first time in January because residents nearby were concerned about odors they were smelling and had been concerned for quite a while and had been there their concerns have been kind of outright dismissed by the operator. We filed a complaint based on this footage, you can see on the right this tank was literally just so poorly maintained that there were parts of it that were porous and they were just pouring leaking emissions off and that which were drifting towards the homes nearby. We filed a complaint, the operator was made to repair that tank. We revisited the same site in March to confirm that these repairs had been made and we did find that that tank had been repaired and the leak had been corrected. But there was another set of tanks on site, which in the beginning of March you can see we saw these emissions coming from another leak. These were coming from the fee patches of this tank. We filed another complaint with the CDPHE they contacted the operator the operator is made to make additional repairs supposedly only a few days after we were there. I followed up again in late March, same leak and you know we filed an additional complaint with CDPHE they reached back out to the operator the operator claimed they still had additional repairs to make. I can thankfully report that I just looked at the site again a week ago. And was able to determine that there are no leaks from any of the tanks. So, things have been corrected for now. But again, this is an example I wanted to share because when we, in our experience when we find sites that are poorly maintained where there are leaks. If we revisit those sites we are inevitably going to find similar leaks or additional leaks, and it's a persistent problem all across the front range and the Western slope and Colorado in general, which just contributes again to our poor air quality impacts on residents who live nearby. So, that's my last slide and you know in conclusion again I just want everyone to take away from this not just the experience of seeing some of these emissions that we've been talking about but recognize the fact that we have to be vigilant about every oil and gas facility because they all have the potential to be polluting and emitting like this. Thank you, Andrew. It suddenly struck me listening to you that you probably should be paid as an inspector by the state, because I don't know that they're inspecting and they do have inspectors but obviously they're too busy. Thank you very much. So, Lynette McLean is next up. She's another one of our team and today she's going to present our call to action, a quick reminder that if you have questions that you would like to ask and are able to stay on. We are going to answer some quick questions at the end. So, put your thing, putting questions in the Q&A section. Thank you, Lynette. Hi everyone. I practiced this, trying to get my screen to share but I have not had any luck so I don't know what is wrong but anyway I'll just say, let's see, let's try real quick here one more time. There it is. Do you see that? Can you see it? No. Not up yet. Okay. Yeah, I can. All right. Well, I will pull it up for myself so I can read it to you. I don't know. Sometimes just, okay. I would say that if you want to report an air quality incident and I'll put this in the chat. You can email the Colorado Department of Health at CDPHE information at state.co.us or you can phone them at 303-692-2020 and I will copy all this and just paste it in the chat. If you do report anything, we would like to know about it so you could email the Longmont Climate Community at longmontclimatecommunityatgmail.com because we are collecting all this information and you can also contact your legislator. There's a number of bills that are up right now that are related to air quality and climate change so it's a pretty exciting time really. And now we're going to do questions and answer. Is that right? Yes, it is. And we have Michael Belmont and Judith Blackburn are going to pick through the questions and they will tell you about the process. Michael and Judith. Fabulous debt live in Andrew. Nothing less than frightening though I have to say. We have only a couple of minutes technically or according to the agenda so we understand that some of you may have to sign off. Andrew, can you all stay for 10 minutes or so and answer a few more questions? That would be great. And the questions we cannot get to, we'll try to get answers to and send the questions and answers to all of the participants as well. So Judith and I will feed some questions to you, try to keep the answers to two minutes or less. Lynette will be our whipcracker for that to that end. And Judith, do you have a question to start with? This is a question for Detlef. Have you been invited or asked by Governor Polis to present some of this information to him? What's happened to Detlef so I'll answer in part. Did you get my answer? You've got some microphone problems, Detlef. I think because you have two accounts open, you're getting a revamp. So can I, can I kick you out for the one that the video is not working? I'll mute it. Okay, let's try it now. Can you hear me now? Oh, no. Let's see, I was going to ask you to unmute on that one, but no, you're having a lot of feedback on that one. So maybe you could start the one that's got the video. Okay, this should work. Okay, all right. And you hear me? Yes, I hear you. Okay. This is weird because I cannot hear you now. Anyway, so I got the question, which was whether or not I've been asked by Governor Polis to present any of this short answers now hasn't I haven't received that invitation as of right now. It's a short answer. Thank you. I want to read an answer from Dr. Jane Turner to some of one of the pictures that Mitzi showed, and I'm reading from her answer in the Q&A. I wanted to let you know that I contacted COGCC regarding the visible flames at the night wells. I was informed that while regulation 903 does not allow flaming. At the normal as a normal process, combustion of excess gas is allowed during the drilling process. They are supposed to keep the flames below the sound wells, the sound walls. And I lodged a complaint that the flames were too high. So that's what happens. I don't think she was satisfied by their response. There was another question about whether those were reported. Obviously they were and I think Mitzi might have reported those as well. And there was a question that live to you. As far as flaring and outgassing, you used to monitor. I contain and in contain and the ratio has that changed. No, we do monitor. I pent in and pentane and the total of four sites right now with a reservoir union reservoir broom field to sites in broom field. They're part of the VOCs that are being monitored we quantify on the order of 20 at each of these sites they're all recorded on these four different dedicated websites. There may not be a lot directly of that ratio on the Longmont website that's a good reminder is something we have got a double check, but it's that's easy to implement. But it is monitoring the data here we work with them all the time. You know there's two individual compounds being measured and you calculate the ratio which you can do in real time on the fly you do it later so all this data are available. Okay, thank you. This is a question for Andrew. I would say that's fair to say that the self monitoring and regulating that is supposed to be done by the oil and gas industry isn't working. Talk about what can be done about this. Yeah, I would say that's fair to say. I think the oil and gas industry has every incentive to not report bad emissions. I mean that it's not really in their interest if they were if they had awful emissions coming up their site to really monitor and or report them so I mean I know you know we're still kind of waiting on some of the returns on one of the changes that was made last year is that sites that are in pre production so the the night pad for instance. Now the operator does have to monitor continue to have a continuous air quality monitoring for the first for through that whole pre production phase plus for the first six months of production. The problem with that regulation and the problem with the way that it's written is that they are sort of allowed to do whatever they they can determine what that means in terms of what kind of monitoring equipment they want to use and how they want to monitor it. It also doesn't it's not like that lives that it's not continuously, even though there's continuous air quality monitoring it's not available to the public in a continuous way they report it back to the local municipality. I think on a monthly basis. So, you know we're still kind of waiting to see how that's implemented but even even if it was implemented in it you know fully, it's not really where we need to be having the operators monitor themselves and monitor their own air quality is not really a recipe for getting accurate and good data from these sites. I mean we really need really need air quality monitoring that is either third party or independent or from the state level in order to make sure that what we're what we're seeing what we're getting in terms of emissions data is accurate and available to the public. Well, maybe for you Andrew this is an interesting question, speaking of monitoring and notifying public, who is responsible for alerting the public when there are poisonous emissions in the area like at Union reservoir, especially if the oil and gas companies plan to really if and when, and as they plan to release gases as a an announcement to the vicinity of the dangers. It's an interesting question and it depends so for instance I pointed out on one of those slides that liquids unloading that maintenance events so for those sorts of events which are planned routine maintenance activities. The operators now have to give, I believe, believe it's 48 hours notice it's not a ton of notice to the surrounding community, or the nearby community so that doesn't necessarily mean like the individual residents but I mean for an eerie for instance the town of the eerie has been getting these notices. I believe potentially actually the residents have but on this 48 hour I believe it's 48 hour rolling basis in terms of when these are going to occur, but it's, you know, 48 out when we could argue whether or not that's an appropriate amount of time in order to kind of notify people. I mean it's not I guess there isn't really given the lack of sort of monitoring on most of these sites if we're not talking about routine sort of activities where there would be advanced notice, then you know residents aren't getting note when some of these plumes for instance that that lift has picked up. No one is necessarily getting notice from any entity that those are occurring because outside of the air monitoring that's been set up. We don't know that those are occurring and drifting across the landscape. And that's the there's just massive blind spots in regards to our ability to track this because there's so little monitoring going on. Okay, this next question might be a good lead in advertise our next series. The question is, is there any data available related to research into the levels of resident reporting asthma or other long issues in the past versus the current day and compare those changes to the emissions. Maybe somebody from our committee would like to answer. Because that's really outside of the purview of the recording this data, this kind of data. This is Karen. I do not think that there's any data. I don't think that we currently that there is a requirement for people to report say COPD or asthma, or maybe types of cancers into a specific database so unless there's a researcher looking at this so for example some research has been done on how close we are to how close somebody is to a well, and whether or not there was a fetal abnormality or premature birth, but it's specific research done from hospital records and distance to well so there are some things that have proven positive, but we have no good database that I'm aware of. We might need a group of citizens willing to coordinate such a thing, I think volunteer scientists on the ground to just keep records that's a very good idea. James asks how alarmed, are you the presenters debt living Andrew about what you are seeing and analyzing and presenting to us. Can you hear me. Yes. Okay, good, good. You know, I see my role to provide information and data and good quality data to the public and anybody who is concerned to, you know, use it in their interests. You know, I try to steer back and ringing alarm bells. But you know these these are very very high levels we see in these plumes that you know if you compare these data with other locations across the country across the world and I you know I have a background in global atmospheric chemistry and research and these are the highest levels I've ever observed in my 3040 years of measuring air pollutants around the world. And there was one, one situation in the unit a basin where we studied in oil and gas basin, the number of years ago where we made similar observations. And that you enter basin. And this this are very extremely high pollution plumes. And you know I'm concerned about people who live in the way of these plumes and are subjected to these these these highly elevated levels of volatile organic compounds. And we don't fully understand the health effects of these very sudden extreme increases in these these VOCs and and these frequenting you know it's not just it happens once a year as I showed with the data. These these events occur dozens dozens hundreds of times a year and the closer you live to the operations. And the more frequently you are subjected to these plumes and the higher the concentrations or, and in one of my slides I showed it's not a single pollutant it's not just methane or isobutane but it's always a mixture. There's dozens and dozens of these VOCs together in this air. It's a mixture, and we don't know much about how you know human system reports to these multiple pollutants being being inhaled at the same time. And most of the health studies to be done concern exposure to individual pollutants so there's no genetic effects of these these different pollutants coming in all together we don't know a whole lot about it. And so now that there's there's there's concerns and there there certainly are reports from the community that report health effects, you know so so associating the pollutants with the health effects you know that's that's another challenging area of study and research which is not my own expertise but you know with my work I'm trying to contribute information to carry this whole discussion forward. I think we'll have this be the last question for this time around, but we will make an effort to answer these questions and get them to the people, especially who asked them. But this is the $64,000 question is anything being proposed, such as an actual state inspection schedule or local inspection and some real enforcement standards. And believe me, that is the question that's coming up for us in the future, and has been with us all along since we first started noticing these problems. So, good question. No answer to it we've tried a lots of different things. Yeah, I mean I'll just really quickly throw out there the fact that you know, one thing for everyone to keep in mind in regards to state inspections of this is, there are 10 to thousands of active well sites in the state of Colorado and comparatively there are a handful of CDPHE investigators and so I mean the capacity is just currently not there for them even if they were doing the best job they could be doing their capacity is not there for them to match the scale of this problem. And so for me, you know really just briefly touching on that other question that deadlift so I think definitely answered was, you know in terms of what's alarming for me is, given the extent to this problem what we know, just what we know from what we can analyze and the data that we do have is that this is a major major issue major major problem, and the response from the state thus far has not been adequate to the scale of the problem and that's what's most alarming to me whether we're thinking about the health impacts on Coloradans, or we're thinking about climate change and the potential health impacts on future Coloradans generations of Coloradans and people across the world is the responses are just not where they need to be to actually resolve these issues and bring this industry under control. Well, we will have to wrap up I do want to say one thing help deadly if you were saying there, you sort of suggested the jury's out about the effects of the health effects of some of these but there's been massive research. I know the positions for social responsibility has their massive collection of hundreds of peer reviewed studies over the last. I don't know 10 years and endocrine disruption, the when the endocrine disruption exchange was active in Colorado was a fabulous research that indicated many serious health impacts of these things. And so, more and more is coming out. So, it is a serious question and that's why the setbacks for instance probably have moved from 300 feet when we started this whole effort in 2012 to 1000 now whatever you know so hopefully it'll be even further out but I think that's partly attributable to the gathering of the mounting evidence that is a serious health impact. One thing I want. Karen, can you say or Lynette where where will this be available this recording this session. We know that. Oh, Lynette, are you going or or Mitzi one of you can talk about Longmont public media and how. So, I know Longmont public media is going to air this. So you can check their side also YouTube for long long public media and also channel eight and channel 14 is also going to provide coverage on this. Did I miss anything Lynette. Can you hear me. Yes. Okay. Yeah, I just now learned how to share but we'll we'll send you a link to the these events and we'll send all of you the links to how to contact the CDPHE and our next events and how to access them. So we'll do that but you can write to Longmont climate community if you have any other questions that didn't get answered Longmont climate community at gmail.com and and for any more information. I think our speakers all were excellent in everybody that attended today, we appreciate it. Yeah, so the next event is June 13 at seven o'clock and we're going to try and make that both virtual and in person. So we don't have a location yet but when we have an agenda and a location we will let you know. Thank you all so much. Thanks to everybody for coming we had a really good participation thank you everyone for your participation and for your great great questions. And presenters if you can stand for just a few minutes we'll just do a quick debrief before we leave but thank you everybody for for attending. Thanks everyone. Have a good day.