C&E Secretary Expresses Appreciation for Auditor’s Work in LORA Report

Contact: Patrick Courreges, 225-342-0510

BATON ROUGE – Louisiana Department of Conservation and Energy (C&E) Secretary Dustin Davidson thanked the Office of the Louisiana Legislative Auditor (LLA) today for both its responsiveness to C&E’s original call for investigation of the Louisiana Oilfield Restoration Association (LORA) and the investigative diligence of a second audit report on the questionable operations of the organization formed under the previous administration.

LORA was a company created in 2019 that, within roughly a month of its formation, entered into a cooperative endeavor agreement with the Office of Conservation within the Department of Natural Resources (now Department of Conservation and Energy). That agreement gave LORA credibility as a legitimate source of financial security (money set aside to cover well plugging costs) for oil and gas operators in the state. In turn, LORA received payments from oil and gas operators to provide the financial security required by Office of Conservation regulations. In exchange, LORA used some of the funding paid by operators for their bonds to plug other operators’ wells that had been orphaned.

“LLA has been working for more than two years to fully understand what went wrong within LORA and what went wrong within the agency prior to this administration. The lack of accountability and oversight that the LLA reported was frankly shocking,” Davidson said. “The work of Legislative Auditor Mike Waguespack and his team has been invaluable to us as we work to repair the damage done to the agency and to the operators who trusted LORA. The department will continue to build out a financial security framework for the future that is reliable and protective of the interests of our people and the environment.”

Following questions raised to the LLA by then-appointed Commissioner of Conservation Monique Edwards in 2023, and further emphasized in 2024 by the incoming administration of Gov. Jeff Landry and then-C&E Secretary Tyler Gray, the auditor’s office has released two reports on LORA – one in Fall 2024 questioning the financial viability of the organization, and this recent report which provided information and allegations about the actions of those who organized, operated and potentially profited by LORA.

Davidson said that several members of the department staff and leadership under the prior administration raised questions and concerns about the purpose and function of LORA, but lacked the authority to undo the agreement or make changes to it without support of the prior administration. As Gov. Landry’s administration transitioned in, Commissioner Monique Edwards again relayed her concerns to incoming Secretary Tyler Gray, who also acted to demand more accountability from LORA.

“Secretary Gray’s task was to re-organize the agency to, among other things, eliminate and prevent the kind of administrative silos that allow something like LORA to happen without oversight before or during its association with the agency,” said Davidson, who succeeded Gray as C&E Secretary in October 2025.

Davidson commends Gov. Landry and former Secretary Gray on their leadership and promptness which accomplished two important things in relation to the issues raised by LORA – getting rid of the firewall within the agency that allowed the Office of Conservation autonomy in its regulatory actions, and working with legislators to create the Natural Resources Trust Authority (NRTA) to bring real financial expertise to oversight of financial security instruments for oil and gas operators.

“Now it falls to my team and I to set further safeguards in place to make sure nothing like this can happen again and to leverage the NRTA’s skill sets to build out a financial security system that provides the protections it is supposed to and cuts the numbers of orphaned wells and the costs associated with plugging them,” Davidson said.

C&E dissolved its association with LORA in 2025 after the LLA’s 2024 audit report called into question its potential solvency and its ability to meet its plugging obligations, while addressing what auditors saw as an unsupervised and unapproved increase of administrative fees for LORA.

C&E has agreed with each of the LLA report’s findings and has made changes to avoid similar issues with any future third-party agreements of that kind. The agency’s current leadership has no plans to entertain such an agreement in the future.

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