|
 The utility's president and chief executive officer, Dennis
Arriola, also said on Tuesday the company would begin this week
drilling a relief well designed to intersect the damaged pipeline
hundreds of feet beneath the surface and inject it with fluids and
cement.
The utility's latest strategy and time frame for addressing the
stench of gas fumes that have sickened nearby residents for weeks
and led to the temporary relocation of 200 families was laid out
during a Los Angles City Council hearing.
SoCal Gas, one of the biggest gas utilities in the nation, is owned
by San Diego-based Sempra Energy. Its leaking storage field at Aliso
Canyon, just outside the northern Los Angeles community of Porter
Ranch, is the second largest such facility in the Western United
States by capacity, after a field in Montana.
 The company pumps gas into storage wells some 8,500 feet below the
site during the summer and draws on those supplies to meet higher
energy demand in the winter.
The leak, detected on Oct. 23, is believed to have been caused by a
broken injection-well pipe several hundred feet beneath the surface
of the 3,600-acre field.
Vast amounts of methane, the principal component of natural gas and
a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, have been
seeping through the soil to the surface since then, despite several
failed attempts by the company to halt the flow.
The scope and complexity of the natural gas leak at Aliso Canyon is
unprecedented in California, said Tim O'Connor, state oil and gas
program director for the Environmental Defense Fund.
The state Air Resources Board has estimated that methane is escaping
into the environment at the rate of 50,000 kilograms per hour,
representing roughly one fourth of all methane emissions throughout
California.
To date, the gas field has belched the equivalent of 800,000 metric
tons of carbon dioxide, about the same emissions from driving
160,000 cars for a year, according to the agency.
[to top of second column] |
Arriola said it could take three to four months more to halt the
flow but that once the leak is sealed off the crippled well will be
permanently abandoned. Residents living about a mile from Aliso
Canyon want the gas field shut down altogether.
The South Coast Air Quality District said it has received nearly
1,000 complaints about the persistent rotten-egg smell of mercaptan,
a chemical added to the normally odorless gas to help detect leaks.
Many also have reported suffering from nausea, nose bleeds,
headaches, breathing difficulties and other ill effects.
In addition to households the company has already paid to
temporarily relocate, 500 more families are waiting to be moved,
said Stephanie Saporito, spokeswoman for City Councilman Mitchell
Englander, whose district includes Porter Ranch.
The utility insists that the leak, while a major public nuisance,
poses no immediate public safety threat because the gas dissipates
outdoors. But county health officials said long-term health effects
from exposure to the gas remain unknown.
Environmentalists have seized on the leak as evidence of an aging
fossil fuel energy infrastructure that has led to thousands of
smaller gas leaks throughout the system that have gone largely
unaddressed.
(Reporting by Diana Crandall; Writing and additional reporting by
Steve Gorman; Editing by Leslie Adler)
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