The California Air Resources Board has reached a proposed agreement with Southern California Gas Co. (SoCalGas) aimed at fully mitigating natural gas released during a leak at the Aliso Canyon gas facility during October 2015-February 2016. Residents from the nearby Porter Ranch subdivision were evacuated as a result.
Public comments on the proposed $119.5-million settlement will be accepted for 35 days following the agreement’s consent decree being lodged with the Los Angeles County Superior Court on Aug. 8.
SoCalGas agreed, among other things, to reimburse city, county, and state governments for costs associated with their response to the leak; establish a program with CARB to mitigate the methane emissions from the leak; and fund local environmental benefit projects to be administered by the government parties, the Sempra Inc. subsidiary said.
“The settlement will also help California meet its ambitious climate goals by advancing projects that capture methane from dairy farms and waste and convert that energy into renewable natural gas for use in transportation,” SoCalGas Pres. Bret Lane said.
CARB said in its announcement that California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) issued a proclamation on Jan. 6, 2016, which called for SoCalGas to pay for a mitigation program developed by CARB that causes full mitigation of the Aliso Canyon leak through projects in California and prioritizes projects that reduce methane and other short-lived climate pollutants (SLCP).
The state agency issued the Aliso Canyon Methane Leak Climate Impacts Mitigation Program on Mar. 31, 2016, which outlines mitigation objectives and project criteria to achieve the proclamation’s requirements and complement existing state efforts to reduce SLCP. CARB’s staff later determined that 109,000 tonnes of methane emissions reductions would be the amount necessary to fully mitigate the leak’s climate impacts, the agency said.
The mitigation agreement is part of the settlement and requires SoCalGas to fully mitigate the leak’s climate impacts by paying $26.5 million to support construction of dairy digester projects in California that will reduce at least 109,000 tonnes of methane emissions, it said.
A week earlier, California’s two US senators at the time, Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, asked US President Barack Obama to form an investigation taskforce led by the US Department of Energy to investigate the cause and effects of the leak, whether the Aliso Canyon facility could be operated safely, and necessary steps to protect other communities nationwide (OGJ Online, Mar 24, 2016).
SoCalGas noted that on July 19, 2017, the California Public Utilities Commission and the Department of Conservation’s Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources Division cleared the utility to resume limited injections at the Aliso Canyon storage facility as described here. State regulators and independent experts at DOE’s National Laboratories have called the safety review conducted at Aliso Canyon the most comprehensive in the nation, the utility said.
Contact Nick Snow at [email protected].