Newsom Can’t Keep Hazardous Waste Spilling Oil Companies In Check. Is This Why?
New data analysis shows nearly one-third of senior staff at CalGEM–the state agency charged with regulating oil and gas companies–came to the agency from the oil and gas industry.
By Matt Ferner
You wouldn’t hire an arsonist to be your fire chief. But that didn’t stop Governor Gavin Newsom from appointing a former Chevron employee to lead the agency tasked with keeping the oil and gas industry in check.
So, how well is Uduak-Joe Ntuk doing as the California State Oil and Gas Supervisor?
About as well as you’d expect. Just ask families in the Morning Star Ranch neighborhood in Bakersfield, who bought homes in a subdivision where children were promised idyllic summers kicking a football or flying a kite.
Imagine waking up in Morning Star Ranch on a Sunday morning, grabbing a cup of coffee, and opening a newspaper to read headlines like this about your neighborhood—the place where you worked hard to live so that you could keep your family safe:
Methane leak confirmed at idle oil wells in Bakersfield, in The Los Angeles Times.
Seven more oil wells leak explosive methane near Bakersfield homes, bringing total to 13, in The Desert Sun.
Discovery of methane leaks in California community is just “the tip of the iceberg”, in PBS NewsHour.
But that’s a nightmare that became a reality this year as idle oil wells in the Kern Bluff oil field started leaking methane, a substance which “can be explosive or cause serious health impacts” such as “asphyxiation”. Worse, if such a thing can be imagined, the “volatile organic compounds that typically leak along with methane have been closely linked to asthma-causing smog and various cancers from long-term chronic exposure.”
As Oil and Gas Supervisor, Ntuk directs the agency responsible for preventing things like methane leaks into family-friendly subdivisions. It’s called the California Geologic Energy Management Division, which is a mouthful, so people just call it—CalGEM. If CalGEM would have responded sooner to force the owners of the idle wells in Bakersfield to plug them, then the leak could have been avoided.
Instead of taking responsibility and profusely apologizing for the colossal failure of his agency to ensure that oil companies plugged the wells before they spewed dangerous gasses, Ntuk minimized blame saying the problem was “minor in nature” and that CalGEM would get around to plugging “the leaks as soon as possible.” However, Ntuk’s characterization of the urgency of the situation is belied both by the “hazardous spill” report that the agency filed with the Governor’s Office and a staffer at CalGEM who told The Desert Sun that Ntuk is “lying” and the leaks are “a ticking time bomb.”
Why would Ntuk lie? And more importantly, why wouldn’t this former Chevron employee turned chief regulator of oil companies, like Chevron, not take more forceful, swift action to force companies to plug idle wells—especially the ones near neighborhoods where children live, play, and go to school? A potential clue is what happens to regulators after they leave office, which is to say during the portion of their career journey that sends them back through the revolving door to the oil and gas industry.
Take Ntuk’s predecessor, acting oil and gas supervisor Jason Marshall, who left the agency in February 2020 and landed a gig months later at Berry Petroleum Corporation, one of Bakersfield’s largest oil producers, as their “Director of Strategic Partnerships and Alliances” (read: responsible for using his clout and connections to schmooze regulators and lawmakers on behalf of the company). Today, Marshall’s success at doing the advocacy equivalent of turning dirty crude oil into the gasoline you buy at the Chevron station has catapulted him into the C-Suite, as a Vice President of the Company. For Ntuk, it’s possible that his family did not even need to wait for him to leave CalGEM to reap financial gains from the oil industry. When Ntuk’s wife ran for city council, the California Independent Petroleum Association gave $7,000 to the campaign. As the Long Beach Post reported, “The association has not donated to any other Long Beach council candidates in at least eight years, which is as far back as online records go in the City Clerk’s office.”
The revolving door illuminated by the Ntuks and Marshalls of the world is problematic, but perhaps inevitable if we’re talking about one or two people at the very top of a large organization. But is it just one or two people?
Golden State Grid conducted a search of a publicly available government salary database maintained by the Sacramento Bee to determine who are the senior people at CalGEM—which we defined as people who earn over $155,000 from the agency in 2021. Next, we cross-referenced that list with LinkedIn to determine the senior CalGEM officials who come from the oil and gas industry. What we found is that far from Ntuk or Marshall being outliers, the data shows that CalGEM is really more of a finishing school for future executives in the oil and gas industry. What follows is an extremely conservative estimate, given that Golden State Grid was unable to access all of the profiles of employees who met the income threshold. But even without complete information, we found that of the 33 people at the agency who meet the income threshold, 10 of them—nearly one-third—had previously worked in the oil and gas industry (CalGEM told Golden State Grid that three of the employees in the 33 examined have subsequently left the agency).
When you expand the lens beyond Ntuk and you see how thoroughly the oil and gas industry is represented in senior staff at CalGEM, the organization that in theory is supposed to be regulating that industry and keeping communities safe, you start to see how the methane leak in Bakersfield could happen.
CalGEM told Golden State Grid that the agency mitigates against the risk of self-interested behavior from its senior “regulators” through a conflict disclosure policy, which prohibits its employees from owning stock in oil and gas companies. What CalGEM’s statement did not say is that the reason this policy exists is because regulators used to not even need to finish finishing school before profiting from the oil and gas industry.
As Consumer Watchdog announced in 2020 following their investigation into the close ties between the oil and gas industry and the state’s regulatory agency: “... seven regulators held up to $100,000 worth of oil company stocks, some in companies they regulated. An eighth ran a consulting business.”
When that scandal erupted, CalGEM created its current policy. Unfortunately, that policy doesn’t strictly prohibit people from owning stock in oil companies, but instead allows people to petition in writing for permission to maintain their stock holdings. But the real issue is not “regulators” who profit from oil and gas shares while employed at the agency. It’s that it is extremely difficult to ask “regulators” to stand up to oil companies—like the ones who do not plug wells in a timely manner, allowing methane to leak into family neighborhoods–when there is a lucrative, prestigious, secure job waiting for them at a place like Chevron once they’ve served enough time at CalGEM to be sufficiently useful to the oil and gas industry.
“The revolving door between CalGEM and the oil industry raises serious questions about the agency’s ability to act in the public interest and protect the communities most impacted by oil and gas extraction,” said Cesar Aguirre, with the Central California Environmental Justice Network, to Golden State Grid. “We already know that regulators have allowed companies to make millions off illegal oil spills in the past. That may be the tip of the iceberg. Californians deserve to know that the regulators charged with protecting our health and safety are acting in our interests, not serving the oil industry.”