Surface Damages at Porter Ranch Site
Enormity of Billowing Methane Plume in California ‘Cannot Be Overstated’
<<< Porter Ranch leak, spewing methane since October, shows ‘gaping vulnerabilities’ in oversight >>>
From an Article by Deirdre Fulton, Common Dreams Blog, December 30, 2015
The toxic methane cloud that has been “billowing” for months over an underground natural gas reservoir near the affluent community of Porter Ranch just north of Los Angeles illustrates “gaping vulnerabilities” in oversight and enforcement of greenhouse gas pollution rules, a California newspaper editorial board declared this week.
A pipe leak has been releasing an estimated tens of thousands of kilograms of methane into the air every hour since mid-October, leading environmentalists like Erin Brockovich to declare it “a catastrophe the scale of which has not been seen since the 2010 BP oil spill.”
“The enormity of the Aliso Canyon gas leak cannot be overstated,” Brockovich wrote earlier this month after visiting Porter Ranch. “Gas is escaping through a ruptured pipe more than 8,000 feet underground, and it shows no sign of stopping. As the pressure from weight on top of the pipe causes the gas to diffuse, it only continues to dissipate across a wider and wider area. According to tests conducted in November by the California Air Resources Board, the leak is spewing 50,000 kilograms of gas per hour—the equivalent to the strength of a volcanic eruption.”
Aerial footage released last week by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) provided the first-ever bird’s eye view of what the organization called “one of the nation’s largest-ever methane leaks.”
Watch the footage below:
As Common Dreams has reported, methane is a dangerous greenhouse gas that packs over 80 times the 20-year warming power of carbon dioxide.
And that’s why the Porter Ranch leak has implications beyond California. “Events of this size are rare, but major leakage across the oil and gas supply chain is not,” said Tim O’Connor, director of EDF’s California Oil & Gas Program, last week.
“There are plenty of mini-Aliso Canyons that add up to a big climate problem—not just in California, but across the country,” he continued. “Regardless of what the future holds for the Aliso Canyon storage field, this is one reason why strong rules are needed to require that oil and gas companies closely monitor for and manage methane leaks.”
The Sacramento Bee echoed that call in a strident editorial on Tuesday. “[T]he fact that a leak of this magnitude happened at all raises all sorts of regulatory questions, starting with why natural gas was even being stored near a planned community of 31,000 people,” the editorial board wrote.
Despite warnings from environmental groups about methane’s climate impacts and Southern California Gas Co.’s own concerns about the site’s aging infrastructure, “state records show it has been more than a year since the pipe with the suspected leak was tested,” the editorial continued. “The leak was found by a gas company employee, not state inspectors. And the California Air Resources Board only recently has begun to home in on methane and other short-lived climate pollutants in addition to carbon dioxide.”
The Bee declared: “Clearly, more robust oversight is needed.”
Southern California Gas Co. officials told the Los Angeles Times on Sunday that they had “pinpointed” the source of the leak. But they also said repairing the leak could still take until the end of March.
For more on the leak and its implications not only for local residents but for the global climate, watch Brockovitch and David Balen, president of the Renaissance Homeowners Association, located just outside the breached well site, on Wednesday’s edition of Democracy Now!:
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What is It Like to Live Next to California’s Gas Blowout Catastrophe
LOS ANGELES — Matt Pakucko was coughing. “This gas, it’s an invisible tsunami,” he said, struggling to clear his throat.
He is a resident of the affluent Porter Ranch neighborhood’s Highlands community, closest to where an enormous volume of natural gas is spewing from a broken well at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility.
“The last three or four days, I’ve been coughing, aches and pains in my shoulders — kind of like flu symptoms without the flu part,” Pakucko said of the symptoms he attributes to breathing air tainted with the gas. “When I get to fresh air, if it’s really bad when we leave, it can be an hour or two before the feelings from the gas end. And that’s pretty typical, what everyone in our community is reporting.”
Source: http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/568f004de4b0cad15e644090
Efforts to plug Porter Ranch-area gas leak worsened blowout risk, regulators say
By Paige St. John, Los Angeles Times, January 16, 2016
Southern California Gas Co.’s effort to plug its leaking natural gas well involves higher stakes than simply stopping the fumes that have sickened many residents of Porter Ranch.
The company also is trying to avoid a blowout, which state regulators said is now a significant concern after a seventh attempt to plug the well created more precarious conditions at the site.
If a blowout occurs, highly flammable gas would vent directly up through the well, known as SS25, rather than dissipating as it does now via the subsurface leak and underground channels.
State officials said a blowout would increase the amount of leaked gas, causing greater environmental damage. That natural gas also creates the risk of a massive fire if ignited by a spark. The risk of fire already is so high that cellphones and watches are banned from the site.
California Department of Conservation spokesman Don Drysdale called the possibility of fire “a concern” even without a blowout. The department is the umbrella agency that oversees the oil and gas regulators responsible for well safety.
The chief deputy director of the department, Jason Marshall, and a senior oil and gas field regulator assigned to daily watch at Aliso Canyon, Scott McGurk, told The Times the site and wellhead were made more unstable by the gas company’s attempts to stop the leak by pumping a slurry directly into the well.
The last of those efforts, which stretched over several days beginning December 22, expanded a crater around the wellhead, state and gas company officials said.
The crater is now 25 feet deep, 80 feet long and 30 feet wide, those officials said. The wellhead sits exposed within the cavernous space, held in place with cables attached after it wobbled during the plugging attempt, Marshall and McGurk said. The well pipe and its control valves are exposed and unsupported within that hole, atop a deep field of pressurized gas.
Southern California Gas is now attempting to stop the leak by drilling relief wells to intercept the damaged well. Workers are not expected to reach the base of the well, 1.6 miles below ground, for at least six weeks.
“If the wellhead fails, the thing is just going to be full blast,” said Gene Nelson, a physical sciences professor at Cuesta College. “It will be a horrible, horrible problem. The leak rates would go way up.”
Sempra Energy, which owns the gas company, declined repeated requests from The Times to discuss current conditions at SS25. A gas company spokeswoman said the utility “would not speculate” on those questions.
At a meeting with community representatives last week, the gas company’s senior vice president for operations, Jimmie Cho, said attempts to plug the well from above were halted “for safety concerns.”
“As much as what’s going on is not a good thing, we don’t want to take a risk of that wellhead being lost,” Cho said. State officials agreed.
“If one pushes too hard … and breaks the well in its entirety, we, the public residents, the operator, have a much bigger problem,” Marshall said.
The gas company would not provide current photos of the site or allow media access. It did not provide a reason.
Aerial photographs obtained by The Times, taken by a pilot who slipped through no-fly zones imposed after the leak began, show the tension cables strung to hold the jeopardized well in place.
The photos, taken five days before the final plug attempt December 22, show that the earth and the asphalt pad that directly surrounded the well are gone, scoured out by the backwash of mud repeatedly forced at high pressure into the leaky well in an attempt to plug it.
Statements by gas company officials and regulators, and descriptions found in internal records describe the conditions around the well. A bridge was cantilevered into place when the crater cut off access to the exposed “Christmas tree” of valves and ports that allow operators to control the well, those officials and documents show.
That wellhead is the only control operators currently have on a well that features a 2 7/8-inch pipe surrounded by a 7-inch casing. Engineering schematics show that the pipe and casing pierce an underground reservoir of gas and that both were used to insert and remove gas from the storage cavern. For all but the top 990 feet, there was no larger pipe to contain a leak if either pipe ruptured.
The two-mile long depleted oil reserve that houses the gas is the largest natural gas storage field west of the Mississippi River. Each fall it is pumped with as much as 86 billion cubic feet of natural gas to run power plants and heat homes in Los Angeles during the winter.
The gas company reported October 23 that gas was escaping through small cracks in the rocky ground around well SS25, which is among 112 former oil extraction wells that have been converted for the natural gas storage operation.
In November, efforts to force heavy mud into the well resulted in blasting open a small vent in the ground from which gas could escape more readily.
By early January, state air quality regulators estimate, the leak had released more than 77 million kilograms of methane, the environmental equivalent of putting 1.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in the air.
Independent health impact studies are not yet complete. Mercaptan added to allow gas to be detected by smell has sickened residents more than a mile away, and Southern California Gas is paying to house more than 2,500 in temporary lodging and has installed air purifiers into the homes of a similar number who chose to stay.
Data captured by aerial surveys commissioned by the state Air Resources Board, which monitors pollution, show the amount of methane released increased over the first three weeks of November to 58,000 kilograms per hour from 44,000.
During that time, a Texas well control company was attempting to plug a suspected hole in the 7-inch well casing by pumping it with increasingly heavier slurries of mud. The mud was pushed against pressurized gas in the well, and the slurry began to find its own escape routes, gouging out a growing hole around the well, according to descriptions provided by Marshall, McGurk and by Cho.
During one of those attempts November 13, a hole in the ground opened 20 feet north of the well, McGurk said last week. Gas that had seeped through diffuse rock fissures on the western side of the narrow ridge began streaming instead from the new vent, he said.
In one internal state report obtained by The Times, an agency official described that kill effort as a “blowout to surface.” ”A large column of gas, aerated mud, and rock formed a geyser around the wellhead,” the state observer wrote. “Mud brine also began to flow from around the wellhead fissures.”
McGurk said the vent allowed a “serious amount of gas” to escape, at which point the state began requiring a state regulatory official to be at the site every day.
Three more efforts to plug the well were made in November, with increasing amounts of backwash and scouring along the wellhead itself that left the well jutting out of a deep hole, without surface support, according to interviews, descriptions contained in agency records and company statements.
During that time, a pilot taking weekly readings for the state Air Resources Board noted a spike in the rate of gas being released to the air from that location.
Source: http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-85591245/
Five (5) Facts to Know about the California Methane Leak – Scientific American
A methane leak in Southern California has forced thousands of people from their homes. Although the gas first began spewing from a leaky underground well in October, the gas company only recently identified the source of the leak.
Now, officials with the company say it could be months before the methane leak is stopped.
But what exactly caused the methane leak in the first place, and how will it affect those in the surrounding areas? Here are five things to know about the Southern California methane leak.
1.Methane is the main component of natural gas
Methane is a simple hydrocarbon made up of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms, and is produced when microorganisms called methanogens combine carbon dioxide and oxygen. It is the main constituent in the natural gas that is used for heating and cooking in some homes.
By itself, methane is colorless and odorless. When it is processed for use in homes, an odorant is added, so that people will be able to smell it if there is a gas leak.
Scientists say that vast stores of methane are buried beneath the seafloor, locked into a cagelike crystal of water molecules, making it stable. Other huge sources of methane are the organic matter frozen into the permafrost in the Arctic.
The methane that’s leaking probably isn’t part of California’s natural reserves. Most of the methane that is used in Southern California homes actually comes from somewhere else (typically West Texas or Southern Colorado). It is transported to California via a massive network of interstate pipelines, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
2. The leak originated underground
The source of the methane leak, which began on Oct. 23, is the Aliso Canyon Gas Storage Field, the largest underground methane storage facility in the western United States. The storage facility is located in a mountain near the community of Porter Ranch.
3. It’s an environmental disaster
Since October, the leak has released 150 million pounds (72,000 metric tons) of methane into the environment, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, which has tracked the leak using infrared cameras. [6 Unexpected Effects of Climate Change]
That could be bad news for the climate. Methane is a greenhouse gas like carbon dioxide, but pound for pound, methane can be 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Methane that enters the atmosphere takes about 12 years to break down — it is mostly removed from the air by chemical reactions with other compounds.
All told, the current leak could be responsible for a quarter of all of the state’s methane emissions this year, and could be the worst methane leak in California’s history.
4. It’s dangerous
The methane leak could also be dangerous for people who live in Porter Ranch. Methane is highly flammable (not surprising, as it is used for combustion in both gas stoves and rockets).
Depending on its concentration in the air, it can also be dangerous to inhale methane fumes, because methane can occupy the same place in blood cells that oxygen normally does. Symptoms of methane exposure include headache, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, weakness and loss of coordination, according to the National Institutes of Health. In serious cases, people may black out or die.
More than 2,000 residents of Porter Ranch, California, have been evacuated from their homes after people complained of headaches and nosebleeds, NBC News reported. Two Los Angeles Unified School District schools have closed in response to the methane leak.
5. It could take months to fix
The Southern California Gas Company has identified the location of the leak in a well 3,000 feet (914 meters) below ground. However, they still don’t know what caused it.
To stop the leak, the gas company said it plans to drill a “relief” well at 5,000 feet (1,524 m), or below the level of the current leak, to divert the methane flow. Then, the company plans to temporarily plug the leaking well with a mixture of mud and fluids, before sealing it permanently with cement, CBS news reported.
But this will all be a tricky process, as it involves using magnetic-ranging techniques to find a 7-inch (17.8 centimeter) pipe located within 1,500 feet (457 m) of rock, while not damaging other pipes nearby, according to the Southern California Gas Company.
The workers will also have to stop their work if air concentrations of methane get too high and pose either a possibility of explosion or a health risk. The whole process could be completed by late February or early March, the gas company said.
Original article on Live Science.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/5-facts-to-know-about-the-california-methane-leak/
The entire Los Angeles metropolitan area and most of Southern California can expect blackouts this summer.
The power grid is under direct threat as a result of the unprecedented, but little reported, massive natural gas leaks at Alisco Canyon that was ongoing for four months as an intense summer heat wave sets in.
According to the Reuters News Service ……..
California will have its first test of plans to keep the lights on this summer…
With record-setting heat and air conditioning demand expected in Southern California, the state’s power grid operator issued a so-called “flex alert,” urging consumers to conserve energy to help prevent rotating power outages – which could occur regardless.
Electricity demand is expected to rise during the unseasonable heatwave on Monday and Tuesday, with forecast system-wide use expected to top 45,000 megawatts, said the California Independent System Operator (ISO), which manages electricity flow through the state. That compares with a peak demand of 47,358 MW last year and the all-time high of 50,270 MW set in July 2006.
That could put stress on the power grid, particularly with the shut-in of Aliso Canyon, following a massive leak at the underground storage facility in October.