A dozen public interest groups on Monday released a report critical of Gov. Jerry Brown’s environmental record and called for the halt on operations to continue at Southern California Gas Co.’s Aliso Canyon storage facility above Porter Ranch, which was responsible for the nation’s largest methane leak.
The groups claim Brown’s energy regulators are in a “race” to get Aliso Canyon back online and maintain that the governor is falling short on environmental regulation in six out of seven key categories, even though he’s been critical of President Donald Trump’s approach to environmental issues.
“Despite Brown’s national profile for fighting climate change, and even as he serves as a foil to Trump’s anti-environmental policies, Brown is not as green as he could be,” the coalition of advocacy and public interest groups said in a statement. “His record is ‘murky’ at best on a scale of ‘clean’ to ‘dirty.’”
The report card was put together by Liza Tucker, energy project director for Santa Monica-based Consumer Watchdog, and released on the day that the window for public comment on re-starting Aliso Canyon closes. On Tuesday, regulators from the state Department of Conservation’s Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) and the California Public Utilities Commission can start mulling their decision to open the storage facility, which officials say is vital to the regional power supply.
Now opponents of the gas field are worried about a rush to judgment.
“It’s clear they want to re-open it, but we don’t need to do that. We have power already. We don’t need this facility. We have plenty of natural gas via pipelines,” said Tucker.
One of the mitigation measures implemented after well SS-25 failed in October 2015 was requiring the gas company to calculate supply and demand on a daily basis rather than forecasting it 30 days in advance.
Regulators and gas company officials speculated that with Aliso Canyon, down there could be power outages in the summer and natural gas shortages in the winter.
“Guess what? We had no blackouts,” Tucker said.
The leak began in late October of 2015 and was not stopped until mid-February of 2016. It pumped 94,067 metric tons of methane into the atmosphere, according to the California Air Resources Board.
Residents are still complaining of getting sick.
State Sen. Henry Stern, D-Canoga Park, has introduced SB-57, which would block regulators from ruling on Aliso Canyon until Texas-based Blade Energy Partners completes its analysis of the root cause of the leak.
On Friday evening, SoCalGas said in an email that it would oppose Stern’s bill, noting that a federal report said the leak happened in the well’s outer casing. As a result, gas can now only be extracted through the well tube, a safer method, they said.
But Blade’s work is not yet finished.
“We understand that some members of the community are concerned about the status of the root-cause analysis, and we appreciate that some in the Legislature are trying to address those concerns. However, Senate Bill 57 is unnecessary,” said SoCalGas in its email. “To protect the reliability of natural gas and electricity services for the more than 20 million people that we serve in communities across Southern California, we respectfully oppose SB 57.”
Neither state officials nor the gas company could immediately be reached for comment.
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