Sacramento Bee Aug 1, 2016
State must close Aliso Canyon permanently BY MATT PAKUCKO
My community, Porter Ranch, is still recovering from the largest gas blowout in U.S. history, which was discovered at Southern California Gas Co.’s Aliso Canyon gas storage facility last October and continued for 119 days.
The disaster displaced more than 15,000 Los Angeles residents from their homes, caused obvious and unseen health impacts, hurt local businesses and wreaked havoc on our climate. Despite the documented health problems and continued emissions from the facility, most everyone, including me, has moved back home. The fight between residents, regulators and SoCalGas over the future of Aliso Canyon continues.
We will be rallying at the Capitol on Wednesday to insist that Gov. Jerry Brown step up as the climate leader he aspires to be, put public health and safety first and close Aliso Canyon permanently.
Our community will never again trust SoCalGas. It has put its bottom line ahead of public safety, beginning decades before the crisis. They made us navigate their unnecessarily complicated relocation and reimbursement system and refuse to properly clean up our homes, despite a Health Department directive.
Government agencies have been equally neglectful, allowing SoCalGas to determine critical issues, even taking the company’s word about the need to reopen the facility. As the summer heats up, Angelenos repeatedly hear SoCalGas threaten 14 days of blackouts without Aliso Canyon. Yet, a close examination of the facts shows that there is little evidence to back its claims. Despite a cold winter and several summer heat waves, there were no blackouts related to the shutdown.
A recent state study made it appear that regulators support reopening Aliso Canyon. But according to emails obtained under the Public Records Act, regulators allowed SoCalGas to write the most critical piece of the report, which exaggerated concerns about gas shortages and summer blackouts.
SoCalGas inflated the projected demand for electric power and underestimated the capacity of its other gas storage facilities and pipeline capacity to substitute for Aliso Canyon, according to a report done for Food & Water Watch.
SoCalGas is rushing to complete state-mandated safety tests and reopen Aliso Canyon, but these inspections revealed that the situation is far bleaker than we might have imagined. Of the 114 remaining storage wells, 67 had to be plugged and isolated and only 15 passed integrity tests, and only after being fixed. So far, not a single storage well could pass all required integrity tests without being repaired. All the failed wells were in service for years before the blowout.
My neighbors and I challenge Brown to consider these facts when deciding whether to allow Aliso Canyon to reopen and make the entire area vulnerable to a future disaster at this deteriorating, dangerous facility. Nothing short of the permanent closure of Aliso Canyon will protect our health and our climate, now and for future generations.
Matt Pakucko is president and co-founder of Save Porter Ranch, a Los Angeles community group. He can be contacted at info@saveporterranch.com.
Daily News on October 30, 2018
Three years later, what we learned from Aliso Canyon by Henry Stern |
Last week marks three years since the gas storage facility at Aliso Canyon blew out, leaking methane and other, still unknown, chemicals into the air above Porter Ranch, in what became the biggest gas leak in U.S. history. For four months, the air in this community was choked with toxic fumes, harming children, the elderly and first responders alike, and thousands of families were dislocated. More than 100,000 tons of methane were released, the carbon pollution equivalent to burning over a billion gallons of gasoline.
In the time since the disaster, we’ve learned some critical lessons about the climate and health risks from gas operations and infrastructure and what we can do to combat these risks.
We learned from Aliso Canyon that there’s no “safe” level of gas for your health. In those first days following the leak, firefighters and other first responders, assured by the Southern California Gas Company that there was no danger, rushed to the site without protective gear. Those firefighters are now suing SoCalGas – alleging the utility tried to downplay the dangers of gas while knowingly exposing first responders to hazardous toxins that have caused ongoing health issues – including cancer.
Thousands of families, increasingly alarmed about the air they were breathing, were eventually evacuated from their homes – but not before experiencing headaches, nausea, nosebleeds, rashes, breathing difficulties and other mysterious health symptoms. The Gas Company has attributed the health effects – without rigorous scientific study – to the odorants, called mercaptans, added to the natural gas to give it its distinctive rotten egg smell. But, methane and odorants were far from the only chemicals released during the blowout. Other chemicals, including crude oil that was being quietly produced at the facility, were also released. Many residents of the northern San Fernando Valley still don’t know the extent of the poison in their bodies or how it will affect them as the years go on.
We also learned from Aliso Canyon that there’s no safe level of gas for the climate. All told, 100,000 metric tons of methane were released, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent that carbon dioxide. Although Aliso Canyon was the nation’s largest man-made greenhouse gas disaster, we’ve learned it is far from unique. Methane emissions are much more common and happening in far larger volume than previously believed. Nationwide, oil and gas operations release approximately 13 million metric tons of methane each year – that’s an Aliso Canyon disaster every three days.
Aging facilities like Aliso Canyon that have been repurposed to store natural gas should not be allowed to operate in our backyards. Especially not when they operate on a major earthquake fault in a high fire risk region. While some important steps have been taken to address fugitive emissions from California’s pipelines, the Trump Administration and Congress have systematically rolled back natural gas safety regulations.
Adding insult to injury, the California Air Resources Board recently ignored the cries of the community and a request from 29 state legislators, by allowing SoCalGas to mitigate the damages of the Aliso disaster entirely outside of Los Angeles region, funneling over $25 million to a single dairy digester project in the Central Valley that will do nothing to clean the air in the San Fernando Valley or reduce our dependency on Aliso Canyon.
Fortunately, California consumers have new tools and incentives to electrify their lives with local clean energy. The next time your old water heater or furnace quits on you, you’ll have new options at your disposal to replace that gas-fired appliance with a smarter electric version, thanks to Governor Brown’s signature of my Senate Bill 1477. Working with builders and manufacturers to reduce the cost of gas-free appliances like super-efficient electric heat pumps could save you thousands of dollars on expensive installations and ongoing gas bills.
As the grid gets cleaner and more durable with new advances in energy storage, localized microgrids and our new statewide target of 100 percent clean electricity by 2045, an electrified future is looking brighter than ever.
We don’t need Aliso Canyon. Despite dire warnings from the Gas Company of blackouts while Aliso was closed, during the period this gas field was taken offline, the market responded as Southern California Edison, Tesla, and a number of other local innovators, stepped up to deploy non-gas forms of energy storage, in record time. That is why our Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom has committed to closing Aliso Canyon even more quickly than the decade horizon Governor Brown proposed last year.
Three years later, the lesson from Aliso Canyon is clear: depending on gas to fuel our lives is a risk we cannot afford to take. Empowering businesses and residents to electrify their lives with clean energy technologies will allow Californians to move past gas and get on with the future.
Sen. Henry Stern (D-Canoga Park) represents nearly 1 million residents of the 27th District living in east Ventura County and northwest Los Angeles County, including the community of Porter Ranch.