It’s been three months since a well at the Southern California Gas Co.’s Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility on the outskirts of Los Angeles sprang a big methane leak. On Saturday the California South Coast Air Quality Management District voted to require that once the leak is stopped, the 63-year-old well must be shut down permanently. But plugging the leak is weeks away, and even when it happens, the methane already released will continue to contribute to global warming for many decades.
So far, the ruptured well has spewed an estimated 87,680 metric tons of methane into the atmosphere, equivalent to 7.3 million tons of carbon dioxide. This amounts to 25 percent of California’s total methane emissions, doubling the usual level of methane emitted in the oil- and gas-rich Los Angeles Basin.
Despite the seriousness of the leak, it took Gov. Jerry Brown more than two months to announce a state of emergency and call for stepped-up inspections of natural gas storage facilities.
Over a 20-year period, methane is 84 to 86 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Over a 100-year period, it is about 34 times more powerful, the drop-off caused by the fact that methane doesn’t remain in the atmosphere as long as CO2.
The leak’s output has fallen from a peak of 127,000 pounds of methane an hour on November 28 to about 40,000 pounds an hour last Friday.
That’s small comfort to the families of Porter Ranch, the nearby well-to-do development situated directly where the wind usually carries the methane plume. More than 2,500 of those families have been temporarily relocated and another 2,700 have applied to be moved until the leak is stopped. That, according to SoCal Gas—a subsidiary of Sempra Energy whose Aliso Canyon storage field contains 113 other natural gas wells—won’t be until the end of February.
Plugging the well, relocating thousands of people and covering their housing expenses and dealing with lawsuits (more than 25 have already been filed) will cost the company billions.
The leak could have been stopped the same hour it was discovered if the well had a working shut-off valve. But it doesn’t. The law doesn’t require one, so, you know, why bother?
Residents have complained about headaches, vomiting, and respiratory problems since the leak began, but company officials and regulators say the level of airborne methane—at its peak about 20 times the level of the rest of the oil- and gas- rich Los Angeles Basin—isn’t a long-term health problem.
People don’t trust the regulators or the gas company in that matter.
“Do we believe the health department? No,” said David Balen, a member of Porter Ranch’s neighborhood council. “The gas company? No. If the gas company called tomorrow and offered to buy our house, I’d do it in a heartbeat.” [...]
“We don’t want to create a great deal of fear — it already exists,” [environmental activist Erin] Brockovich said. “But when you have 5,000 people all experiencing the same symptoms, why would you continue to believe what Southern California Gas says, that it can’t harm you?”
One activist, Maya Golden-Krasner, said last week in an op-ed in the Sacramento Bee that the leak may have been the result of fracking, and she called for the governor to put an immediate end to fracking in natural gas storage areas:
The facts about this little-known practice were buried in a recent California Council on Science and Technology report. “Hydraulic fracturing facilitates about a third of the subsurface storage of natural gas in the state,” and is especially common in Aliso Canyon, the report says. Operators frack storage wells to increase gas production, which decreases by about 5 percent a year, according to a U.S. Department of Energy report.
In California, natural gas is often stored in depleted oil wells built more than 60 years ago. These aging wells were not designed to handle the extremely high pressure of fracking. Their metal casings are often corroded, making them susceptible to damage caused by acids and other chemicals injected at high pressures.
While the Aliso Canyon leak—which Brockovich compared to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill—has captured a limited amount of media attention outside the West coast, the accumulation of lesser methane leaks that is a more serious long-term problem has gotten even less coverage. Many of these leaks can be found in urban areas that have older natural gas infrastructures. Aging pipes tend to rupture after six or seven decades of use, and such pipes are older than that in some cities.
Then, too, there are leaks in many developed natural gas fields. Exactly how much methane is going into the atmosphere from those is unknown. But some recent studies have concluded that emissions from working gas fields are greater than previously calculated.
The Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing new rules for emissions of methane and volatile organic compounds. But these only will apply to new and modified installations, not existing ones. And, naturally, opposition to the new rules will spark litigation that could delay their implementation.