By Susan Shelley
A bill that would have required the closure of the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility by 2027 was gutted and killed in the state Senate, with the author complaining on the Senate floor, “I get it. The gas industry is very powerful.”
Yes, but that’s just a sliver of the story of Aliso Canyon, where a gas storage well blowout in October 2015 caused over 8,000 households to evacuate their homes in Porter Ranch, a community located about 1 1/4 miles away from and downhill of the SS-25 well where the leak occurred.
Part of the story is why those homes were built there in the first place.
Oil was discovered in Aliso Canyon in the late 1930s. The particular well that leaked in 2015 was drilled in 1953.
In 1972, Sempra Energy, parent company of SoCalGas, turned the then-depleted oil field into an underground storage facility for natural gas. The company would buy gas in the summer, when rates were low, and deliver it through pipelines to local customers in the winter. Natural gas isn’t just something that’s used for stoves, furnaces and water heaters. It’s also used to power the generators that provide electricity to the entire region.
Even today, with state politicians bragging that California can run on sunshine and breezes, natural gas provides a very significant share of the electricity we need to power our civilization, such as it is. You can see for yourself how the state’s energy grid is powered by going to CAISO.com and checking “Today’s Outlook.” As this is written, natural gas is providing 14.2% of the state’s current electricity supply, and the sun is still up.
CAISO, the California Independent System Operator, reports that at this moment, renewables are providing 66.7% of the current electricity supply, and 83.7% of that power is solar.
You see the problem. The sun goes down. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
So we still need natural gas, and it would have been nice if the politicians of the 1980s had explained to everybody that the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility is critical infrastructure that provides reliability and cost stability for essential public utilities, and people should live at a safe distance from it.
Instead, between 1982 and 1989, members of the Los Angeles City Council and Mayor Tom Bradley accepted $245,000 in campaign contributions from The Porter Ranch Development Company, and in 1989, Mayor Bradley gave his approval to the Porter Ranch development after reaching an agreement with Councilman Hal Bernson, an advocate for the project, to have the developer provide affordable housing and pay for new freeway ramps.
In 1990, the City Council voted 14-0 to approve the construction of the new homes in Porter Ranch. Before they voted, they listened to three hours of public comment from local residents. The topics of the comments were trash, traffic and sewage.
Did everybody know that the new Porter Ranch development was walking distance from a working gas storage facility and not very far from an active oil drilling site?
Probably not.
Everybody knows now.
But now, it’s too late. The Aliso Canyon facility is still critical infrastructure, and all the hand-painted protest signs in the world can’t change that.
A number of laws, regulations and government agencies control the energy industry, often with conflicting demands and goals. Existing law requires CAISO to ensure the reliability of electrical service, requires utilities to plan for and procure resources that are adequate to meet peak demand, and requires the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to figure out how to ensure just and reasonable rates, all while trying to convert the state to the use of intermittent, unreliable and costly solar and wind energy.
Good luck with that.
The restrictions on the use of Aliso Canyon following the 2015 incident led to higher utility costs. According to a report published by the CPUC, SoCalGas customers paid about $102 million more per year in gas commodity costs from 2016 to 2018, and electricity customers paid about $916 million in excess costs.
SoCalGas told the state Legislature that Aliso Canyon is safe now because they have completed safety measures that meet or exceed current legal and regulatory requirements.
Let’s hope so.
Write to Susan at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley.
This column was originally published by the Southern California News Group.