The enormous methane gas leak at the Southern California Gas Company’s (SoCalGas) Aliso Canyon storage site near the San Fernando community of Porter Ranch has been leaking methane gas since October 2015.
And after all this time, it still remains unplugged, pumping methane gas into the atmosphere, sickening people and forcing the relocation of thousands of residents. In the first month of the leak, the amount of methane released by the leak amounted to a quarter of all California’s methane emissions, according to LA Curbed.
Now, SoCalGas is saying it will still be months before the leak can be plugged. It seems every attempt at trying to plug the leak creates even bigger problems, according to The LA Times. Apparently, the gas company is worried that its attempts to plug the leak could easily cause a blowout, especially now that they have failed for the seventh time to stop the leak.
Should a blowout occur, reports CBS Los Angeles, the highly flammable gas would vent straight up through the well, known as SS25, rather than dissipating as it is doing now. And of course, any spark would increase the risk of fire, and the risk is extremely high, so high that cell phones and watches are banned from the site.
California Department of Conservation spokesman Don Drysdale says the risk of fire has already been a big concern, even without the possibility of a blowout. A senior oil and gas field regulator assigned to daily watch at Aliso Canyon, Scott McGurk, told the LA Times the site and wellhead have been made more unstable because of the attempts by the gas company to pump slurry directly into the well.
The site now has a crater 25 feet deep, 80 feet long and 30 feet wide, dug by gas company employees to better expose the wellhead. However, the wellhead is now being held in place with cables after it started wobbling. The well pipe and its control valves are exposed now and without any support, and all this mess is sitting on top of a very deep field of pressurized gas.
“If the wellhead fails, the thing is just going to be full blast,” said Gene Nelson, a physical sciences professor at Cuesta College. “It will be a horrible, horrible problem. The leak rates would go way up.”
CBS News is also reporting that the levels of toxins being released by the methane gas leak have been seriously underestimated. It appears that SoCalGas underestimated the number of times the cancer-causing chemical, benzene had been released into the atmosphere. Originally, SoCalGas said there had been no elevated levels of the toxic compound.
It needs to be noted that SoCalGas would not allow news media near the site or allow photographs of the site. The seriousness of the methane gas leak in Southern California has been grossly under-reported by the media. In fact, it is a very serious environmental threat and a threat to the lives of the residents in the vicinity of Aliso Canyon, and perhaps beyond.