Since October 23, a massive methane leak from a well in an underground natural gas storage field in southern California’s Aliso Canyon has spewed 91,625 metric tons of the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, according to a counter at the website of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). That has the same impact on our climate as 7.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. More than 2,500 households have been temporarily relocated from Porter Ranch, an upscale development directly in the path of the methane plume.
And while the amount of methane being released from Southern California Gas Co.’s well SS-25 has sharply dwindled from its November peak, the leak from the ruptured well is not expected to be plugged until the end of the month—and even that is not guaranteed. SoCalGas is a subsidiary of Sempra Energy, a Fortune 500 company that had revenues of $11 billion in 2014 and has 17,000 employees worldwide and 32 million customers, according to its website.
The California Public Utilities Commission is considering closing the 3,600-acre natural gas field, which is reportedly the second-largest such operation in the nation. With a total of 115 wells, it has a capacity of 86 billion cubic feet of natural gas. More than half the wells, including the leaking SS-25, are 57 or more years old.
But shutting down the field could create serious reliability problems because there’s not enough pipeline capacity to handle a shortfall, and other storage operations in the area aren’t big enough to provide gas quickly when required.
Meanwhile, environmental activists, including EDF, are using the leak to draw attention to California’s widespread use of hydraulic fracturing to pry natural gas and oil from shale formations. “Fracking,” as it’s colloquially called, has driven a revolution in U.S. gas and oil production in the past half-dozen years.
One problem is that unburned methane is 84 to 86 times more potent in the short run than CO2, and fracking, according to Prof. Robert Howarth, may be contributing as much as 12 percent of annual U.S. methane emissions.
It’s not that well SS-25 itself was fracked, according to DeSmogBlog, a climate change activist website. But other wells in Aliso Canyon have been. A report by the California Council on Science and Technology last January noted that “About two times a year on average, operators of gas storage facilities use hydraulic fracturing to enhance storage, mostly in one facility serving southern California (Aliso Canyon).”
At EDF, Mark Brownstein writes:
The troubling fact is that Aliso Canyon is just the tip of a very big iceberg, reflecting both the industry’s widespread methane problem, and the potential local risks of over 400 other storage facilities nationwide. It spotlights a longstanding, largely invisible problem, promising to shift political dynamics around solutions. And the penalty phase, when it comes, will hopefully codify important principles that will also have a big effect on industry behavior.
For starters, Aliso Canyon is a particularly egregious example of a problem that’s happening every day across the country. Right now, methane is leaking at every stage of the oil and gas supply chain, from thousands of wellheads to the miles of local utility lines under our streets.
The situation is complicated by the fact that these mostly small leaks—many of them from decaying infrastructure, including underground pipes that are six, seven, or more decades old—add up to more than 7 million tons of methane emissions a year. That, Brownstein says, makes for the same 20-year climate impact as 160 coal-fired power plants.
Even in states where there are rules in place to control methane leaks, enforcement is spotty.
In the case of SS25, it’s been known for nearly a quarter century that the well was leaking a bit. In 1979, a broken safety valve meant to prevent bigger leaks was removed but not replaced. Had a new one been installed, the October 23 leak may never have happened.
It gets worse than that. Digging through documents filed with the state, EDF discovered that in 2013, SoCalGas had received taxpayer money to conduct upgrades on equipment, including safety valves. The filing shows that SoCalGas got an extra $898,000 a year from the state to replace 5 percent of its safety valves at Aliso Canyon. EDF says these funds were not spent for that purpose.