[defap]

It's alleged that they made misleading claims, but it's not like the whole operation was a complete fabrication. There were plants and machines and whatnot, as can be seen in several articles on tis topic.

So it's plausible that they illegally dumped wastewater as part of whatever it is they're doing that isn't working as advertised.

[nullc]

Fair enough, though at some point it starts becoming a bit hard to distinguish between what OpenAg was doing and what a significant fraction of all demos do.

It's typical for some amount of 'rigging' to exist in demos, particularly because Murphy's law has an ugly way of rearing its head. At a very minimum, almost everyone goes over the demo many times and fix or avoid any issue that causes a failure or questions that can't be easily and decisively answered.

I really did get the impression from the first articles I read on OpenAG that the claim was that they were doing absolutely nothing and that it was 100% faked. The article on the nitrates discharge was surprising to me in light of that.

I'm perhaps a bit jaded also by seeing how much computer science / signal processing academic publication is essentially fake. "The desktop version doesn't really exist but we have a basement version doing stuff" seems like a fairly mild level of deception compared to many other things I've encountered.