The California gas leak that prompted a state of emergency, explained

by David Roberts
www.vox.com

On October 23, Southern California Gas Company discovered a leak at its Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility. It is still leaking, spewing methane into the atmosphere, sickening nearby residents, and prompting Gov. Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency. It is widely being hailed as the worst environmental disaster since the BP oil spill. And SoCal Gas says the leak likely won’t be contained until March at the earliest.

There’s a lot of great journalism being done around the spill — the LA Times’s ongoing coverage is particularly good — but here’s a quick roundup of the basic facts.

Where is the leak?

The Santa Susana Mountains north of Los Angeles contain compressed layers of sedimentary rock that arch upward, like upside-down bowls. They once held enormous oil deposits, but those were mostly tapped out by the early 1970s, when SoCal Gas bought portions of the oil fields to use as natural gas storage.

The Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility, just a mile away from the affluent northern LA community of Porter Ranch, is enormous. It’s the second largest in the western US, with some 86 billion cubic feet of capacity, larger than any human-made structure could match. The facility is an important tool used by the utility to respond to fluctuating power and heat demand.

(Photo: JONATHAN ALCORN/AFP/Getty Images)

Porter Ranch, in north LA.

One of the wells in the Aliso Canyon facility, SS-25, is leaking methane. Engineers still do not know why, or exactly where in the well the leak is located. Like many of the wells that go down into the “capstone” atop the gas deposits, SS-25 is extremely deep, extending almost 9,000 feet (more than a mile and a half) into the earth.

SS-25 was built in 1954, shifted to gas storage in 1973, and was last upgraded in 1979. It was last inspected on October 21, 2014.

Why is it still leaking, and how long will it last?

Attempts to stop the leak have been unsuccessful. When it was first discovered, the company began dumping a mix of brine and mud down the well, to contain the gas. Then it ran into an ice plug, where water had bonded with the methane. The company melted the ice plug with antifreeze and continued dumping, but the pressure of the gas coming up, 2,700 pounds per square inch, remained higher than the pressure of the mud going down. Eventually the company had to abandon that strategy, for fear of pushing mud so hard it would fracture the pipe.

The fallback strategy is to drill two relief wells that will go down alongside SS-25 and intersect it where it pierces the capstone. The new wells will allow more mud to be dumped, more directly stanching the flow (one is for backup in case the other fails).

(SoCal Gas)

Drilling the relief wells is a tricky business. Engineers are finding their way using magnetic sensors, but to insert them the drills must be withdrawn, which itself takes a full day. They expect that the wells will be done in March.

(Most of this comes via an excellent account by the LA Times’s Thomas Curwen, which contains more detail if you’re interested.)

What’s coming out of the well, and why is it a problem?

Two substances are coming out of the well, creating a long-term and a short-term problem.

First, the leaking gas contains enormous amounts of methane, which is a highly potent greenhouse gas. It doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, but it is much more effective at trapping heat while it’s there — 25 times as potent as CO2 over a 100-year time period, and some 84 times as potent over a 20-year period.

And while methane is nontoxic — as far as scientists know, breathing it, except at very high doses, has no long-term ill effect — it does contribute to smog, a perennial problem in LA.

And this is a lot of methane. Methane leaks from natural gas operations are a longstanding point of contention between fracking companies and environmentalists, who have called on the Environmental Protection Agency to more tightly regulate them. But the typical “fugitive” leaks from gas wells are nothing like this.

(US EPA)

As of late last month, the California Air Resources Board estimated that the well had spewed up to 1.9 billion standard cubic feet of natural gas, the greenhouse gas equivalent of 1.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, as much as 330,000 cars pollute in a year. Yet only 2 percent of what’s stored in the facility has been lost, and there are months to go before the leak is stopped.

Meanwhile, the amount being leaked every day represents an astonishing 25 percent of California’s total methane emissions. It has doubled the methane emissions associated with natural gas production in the state.

That rate is slowing, though, thanks to CoCal draining some of the gas reservoir and reducing the pressure. CARB says the amount of gas being released has declined from a late-November peak of 60,000 kilograms an hour to roughly half that.

The Environmental Defense Fund has a real-time counter:

The second product of the well is mercaptan, a stinky chemical added to (odorless) natural gas so that people can detect a leak. Though mercaptan is also reported to have no long-term ill effects, the giant stink cloud covering Porter Ranch has led to reports of dizziness, nausea, nosebleeds, and vomiting among both people and pets. (Here’s a Health Department assessment.)

What’s happening to nearby residents?

Well, they are pissed — pissed it took SoCal Gas so long to find the leak and tell them the truth about it; pissed it took Brown so long to declare a state of emergency; pissed it’s going to take months to stop the leak. Dozens of people have reported health problems. Two local schools have been closed and their students relocated.

http://twitter.com/latimes/status/679125493715738624/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

SoCal Gas has struck a deal with the city of Los Angeles that commits the company to relocating families who ask within 72 hours, which promises to be a serious challenge. The company has already relocated 2,100 families, filling up nearby motels and rental houses; some 2,600 more families are already in the queue.

Meanwhile, houses sit empty, vulnerable to crime and almost certainly declining in value with every day that passes.

How screwed is SoCal Gas?

Pretty screwed. It has already dropped about $50 million fighting the leak. Some 25 lawsuits have been filed against the company, and more are expected. Legal experts think the company’s liability could reach the billions, as the region grapples with long-term effects on health and land value.

It doesn’t help that a “deep subsurface valve,” which could have cut off the flow of gas, was removed from the well in 1979 and never replaced:

In 1979, SoCal Gas told state regulators that it replaced the safety valve on the well, according to attorneys for the residents. But Rodger Schwecke, a SoCal Gas executive, said in a public meeting last month that the valve was old and leaking and the company decided not to replace it because it was not a “critical well,” attorneys said.

Oops.

One of the reasons Gov. Brown delayed declaring a state of emergency is that he wanted to make sure SoCal Gas — not its ratepayers, not the citizens of California, not the federal government — paid the full cost of the spill. In his order, he said that the company would be responsible not only for all costs related to the spill and the response, but also for a program to mitigate the effects of the greenhouse gas emissions.

There’s not much precedent for disasters this huge, but all signs point to SoCal Gas being on the hook for billions, for a very long time.

What is California doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again?

In Brown’s order, he made a number of announcements about the immediate response to the spill — stopping the leak, protecting residents, making sure SoCal Gas gets the bill — but he also announced some new policies.

A set of “emergency regulations” will go into place immediately, requiring:

at least daily inspection of gas storage well heads using gas leak detection technology such as infrared imaging; ongoing verification of the mechanical integrity of all gas storage wells; ongoing measurement of annular gas pressure or annular gas flow within wells; regular testing of all safety valves used in wells; minimum and maximum pressure limits for each gas storage facility in the state; a comprehensive risk management plan for each facility that evaluates and prepares for risks, including corrosion potential of pipes and equipment.

A number of state agencies will collaborate on a comprehensive report on “the long-term viability of natural gas storage facilities in California.”

(Shutterstock)

Also, as mentioned earlier, the California Public Utilities Commission will develop a mitigation program sufficient to offset the greenhouse gases from the spill, “funded by the Southern California Gas Company.”

At two and a half months, the leak has spewed the equivalent of almost 7 million metric tons of CO2. Let’s say the leak is shut down in two months and there’s 5 million more. That’s 12 million tons, in a state that emits around 459 million tons a year — about 2.5 percent of the total. But it is California’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and will, remarkably, add another third again to the state’s total methane emissions.

Mitigating 12 million metric tons of CO2 is no small thing. That is, according to EPA’s CO2 equivalency calculator, the total annual energy use of about a million homes or 2.5 million passenger vehicles. Or, put another way, it’s like burning almost 6,500,000 short tons of coal.

It will be very interesting to see what the CPUC comes up with.

Are there lessons here about climate change?

Yes and no.

Yes, in that methane emissions from natural gas production, storage, and transport constitute a big problem that doesn’t get enough attention. It is miserably regulated in California as well as nationally.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration released methane regulations for new and modified oil and gas drilling operations in August, meant to reduce methane emissions 40 to 45 percent over the next 10 years. But environmentalists are still pushing for regulations on existing operations, which they say will be needed to hit the climate goals Obama agreed to in Paris. And while California is moving to tighten regulations, methane remains a huge problem in wild-west fracking states.

(US EPA)

Nonetheless, it’s worth nothing that, cumulatively, carbon dioxide is a much, much worse climate problem than methane, and that oil and coal are both much, much worse climate problems than natural gas. Even under the most optimistic conceivable scenarios, natural gas will be with us for a long time, longer than coal, maybe even longer than oil.

And like all fossil fuel infrastructure, natural gas facilities are potentially dangerous. So while they’re around, they need to be well-regulated. The deeper lessons of the California natural gas leak are the same old boring ones: Good government matters. Serious regulations matter. Well-funded, fair, and vigorously applied law enforcement matters.

And, of course, the need to transition to carbon-free energy is as urgent as ever.

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http://www.vox.com/2016/1/11/10749602/california-gas-leak-explained