It looks like whatever reference_col argument is passed to imputing. impute_all_assets_by_correlation, the reference_col then passed to the internally called impute_data function is set to impute_col...
https://github.com/NREL/OpenOA/blob/47ca939a632cd73264a0d5faa90dce6a530930ac/openoa/utils/imputing.py#L211