The Aliso Canyon gas leak (also called Porter Ranch gas leak and Porter Ranch gas blowoutMatt Ferner, Lydia O'Connor (8 January 2016) Here's What It's Like To Live Next To California's Gas Blowout Catastrophe) was a massive methane leak in the Santa Susana Mountains near the neighborhood of Porter Ranch in the city of Los Angeles, California, United States. Discovered on October 23, 2015,Sharon McNary (10 February 2016) Sorting out Porter Ranch facts vs. rumors gas was escaping from a well within the Aliso Canyon underground storage facility. This second-largest gas storage facility of its kind in the United States belongs to the Southern California Gas Company (SoCal Gas), a subsidiary of Sempra Energy. On January 6, 2016, Governor Jerry Brown issued a state of emergency. On February 11, the gas company reported that it had the leak under control. On February 18, state officials announced that the leak was permanently plugged.
An estimated of methane and of ethane were released into the atmosphere.Conley et al., Methane emissions from the 2015 Aliso Canyon blowout in Los Angeles, CA. In: Science (2016), . The initial effect of the release increased the estimated 5.3 Gt of methane in the Earth's atmosphere by about 0.002%, diminishing to half that in 6–8 years.
It was widely reported to have been the worst single natural gas leak in U.S. history in terms of its environmental impact.
The entire rest of the South Coast Air Basin combined, with a population of about 18 million people, emits approximately 413,000 tonnes of methane and 23,000 tonnes of ethane annually. The Aliso gas leak's carbon footprint could be larger than the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
In comparison, a remote sensing satellite found that the Raspadskaya coal mine is releasing 762,120 metric tons, or 832,200 short tons, of methane every year, with no remediation planned.
The storage started operating again at reduced capacity of 29 Bcf in 2017, increased to 41 Bcf in 2021, and to in 68 Bcf in 2023.
Facility After oil was discovered at Aliso Canyon in 1938, J. Paul Getty's Tidewater Associated Oil Company produced oil and gas until the Sesnon-Frew reservoir, the largest reservoir within the oil field, was depleted in the early 1970s. On December 18, 1968, a blowout and fire occurred at one of the wells when an operator attempted to remove two gas-lift valves, destroying equipment but causing no injuries. Getty sold his portion of the field to Pacific Lighting Company, a gas company, which repurposed it to gas storage in 1972. As opposed to current practice, older wells were not sealed to the surrounding rock formation, including their often more than one mile of steel casing. Today, "cement from the surface of the ground to the bottom of the well [...] makes the casings stronger and protects them from water." The Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility contains 115 wells tapping a reservoir that "hold[s] up to 86 billion cubic feet of natural gas for distribution to residences, businesses, and electric utilities in the L.A. basin". The field is the second largest storage facility of its kind in the United States.
Discovery of leak Southern California Gas Company said the leak in well SS-25 was discovered "on October 23 during one of its twice-daily well observations."South Coast Air Quality Management District (23 January 2016)SCAQMD Hearing Board Orders SoCalGas to Enact Comprehensive Program to Cut Odors and Air Pollution from Aliso Canyon Gas Leak Residents of the nearby Porter Ranch reported what they thought was a home with a major leak on October 23, 2015. SoCal Gas "went from home to home to home, giving everybody the A-OK and [...] didn't admit to having a gas leak until [...] probably around the 28th of October."Amy Goodman Erin Brockovich: California Methane Gas Leak is Worst U.S. Environmental Disaster Since BP Oil Spill Democracy Now, December 30, 2015, retrieved January 11, 2016.
Local residents believed the gas blowout started before SoCal Gas admitted to discovering it, and many residents reported having unexplained illnesses a week or so earlier. According to KPCC's website, some residents posted complaints of earlier symptoms on a Porter Ranch gas leak Facebook page.
This event has been called a blowout in many news reports and by the Attorney General of California, Xavier Becerra. For instance, a February 2016 article in the Orange County Register called "Gas facility that had blowout over Porter Ranch will have to play by new rules." stated "in the case of the blown-out well, the casing is believed to have failed under high pressure, allowing the gas to escape." According to OSHA's website a blowout is "an uncontrolled flow of gas, oil, or other well fluids" from a well."
As of February 1, 2016, the SS-25 well released an estimated 91,000 metric tons of methane gas." The Huffington Post said that "while this gas blowout has prompted comparisons to BP's oil well failure in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989, experts say this leak will have further-reaching environmental consequences."
Causes The source of the leak was a metal pipe in a breached casing of injection well "Standard Sesnon 25" (SS 25) that lies deep. SoCal Gas had hypothesized that the leak was no more than down in the column used to move gas in and out of the well. Well SS 25 was drilled in 1953 and initially had safety valves, which were removed in 1979 because the valves were old and leaking. Because the well was not considered "critical, that is, one within 100 feet of a road or a park, or within 300 feet of a home", the valves were only removed and not replaced. Multiple safety valves had been removed from the Aliso Canyon/Porter Ranch 1950s-era pipes in 1979, and were never replaced, a fact that was also confirmed by a special investigation into the leak by Congressman Brad Sherman's office.A Staggering Methane Leak Has Caused a State of Emergency in CA The Big Picture RT January 7, 2016, retrieved January 11, 2016Article in CBS 19 January 2016 accessed 31 January 2017 The atmospheric scientist Steve Conley said the wellhead in Aliso Canyon was 61 years old and he was not "shock[ed] that it failed".Edward Oritiz UC Davis scientist key to measuring massive methane leak at Aliso Canyon Sacramento Bee, January 7, 2016 One reason for the casing failure may have been gas flow not just through the tubing, but also through the casing "in order to meet the demand of a customer", as told by an injection well expert of Texas A&M University interviewed by NPR.California Examines Safety Of Gas Wells Amid Methane Leak. NPR All Things Considered, January 21, 2016, retrieved January 22, 2016
On December 7, 2015, an anonymous video was published that showed a cloud of methane gas hovering over the community of Porter Ranch. The image was captured with an infrared camera, showing the extent of the otherwise invisible plume.
On May 17, 2019, the California Public Utilities Commission announced that Blade Energy Partners had completed their root cause analysis of the gas leak that occurred on October 23, 2015. The principal findings from the root cause analysis include:
The leak's direct cause was a rupture of the outer 7-inch well casing due to microbial corrosion from the outside resulting from contact with groundwater. SoCal Gas did not conduct detailed follow-up inspections or analyses after previous leaks. Blade Energy identified more than 60 casing leaks at Aliso Canyon before the October 2015 incident going back to the 1970s, but no failure investigations were conducted by SoCal Gas. SoCal Gas lacked any form of risk assessment focused on well integrity management and lacked systematic practices of external corrosion protection and a real-time, continuous pressure monitoring system for well surveillance. Updated well safety practices and regulations adopted by the California Geologic Energy Management Division address most of the root causes of the leak identified during Blade Energy's investigation.
On May 17, 2019, the California Public Utilities Commission also published a video describing the details of the leak.
In response to the report from Blade Energy, SoCal Gas issued a response stating "Blade's report confirms SoCal Gas complied with gas storage regulations in existence at the time of the leak. Blade Energy also determined that SoCal Gas' updated practices in 2019 and new state regulations address most, if not all, of the causes identified in the report."
Emissions Natural gas consists largely of methane, an invisible and odorless greenhouse gas with a global warming potential 86 times greater than carbon dioxide in a 20-year time frame, tailing off to about 29 times the effect of carbon dioxide in a 100-year time frame on a mass-per-mass basis.Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Summary for policymakers. in: Climate change 2013: The physical science basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Technical report, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA., 2013 The leak initially released about 44,000 kilograms (kg) of methane per hour or 1,200 tons of methane every day, which in terms of greenhouse gas output per month compares with the equivalent effluvia from 200,000 cars in a year. On January 14, 2016, Time magazine compared the 1.6 million lb of methane released each day to the emissions of six coal-fired powerplants, 2.2 million cows per day, or 4.5 million cars.Justin Worland, Heather Jones. This Is How Much the California Gas Leak Is Hurting the Planet Time magazine, January 14, 2016, retrieved January 17, 2016. As of January 2016, the latest methane measurement per the California Air Resources Board (Carb) was from December 22, 2015, and had decreased from a peak of 58,000±12,000 kg/h to 30,300 kg/h, the equivalent of more than 1.4 million cars by a different calculation using EPA estimates.Paul Blake How many cars and burping cows equal the California gas leak?, BBC News, Washington, January 11, 2016 The Aliso gas leak carbon footprint is referred to as "larger than the Deepwater Horizon leak in the Gulf of Mexico".California's Methane Gas Leak Environmental Catastrophe Explained Antidote, interview with Timothy O'Connor, TheLipTV2, 36 min, January 6, 2016, retrieved January 11, 2016 This single event had a 100-year global warming potential of about 1.5% of the entire annual SoCAB methane and carbon dioxide emissions.
Steve Conley, an atmospheric scientist at UC Davis and owner of Scientific Aviation, independently measured the gas emissions. He sampled the air by flying over the site in his single-engine airplane equipped with an analyzer, which is one of only 3 or 4 of such planes in the country. He said the Aliso Canyon flights were "the hardest [...] I've ever done" because of the headache-inducing smell and sickening turbulence. He doubted the readings initially, and "thought [the instruments] had stopped working because I'd never seen measurement that large before." He had coincidentally been contracted by the California Energy Commission prior to the gas leak, and said that if he had not been contracted and ready to go, "no one would have known how big [the leak] was."
Methane emissions from the Aliso Canyon gas leak were detected by the TCCON site at Caltech within a day of the start of the leak, but researchers at Caltech did not have an explanation for what was causing something "really weird" over Pasadena until later. TCCON's monitoring data were used in analyses of the leak to estimate ethane emissions of 7,700 ± 1,700 tonnes using Steve Conley's methane estimate of 97,100 tonnes.