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Giant Methane Leak in California Won't Be Capped For Months
Motherboard takes a look at the ongoing leak from a deep well in Southern California, and the engineering challenges that mean it won't be stopped for a while. From Motherboard's report:
An enormous amount of harmful methane gas is currently erupting from an energy facility in Aliso Canyon, California, at a startling rate of 110,000 pounds per hour. The gas, which carries with it the stench of rotting eggs, has led to the evacuation 1,700 homes so far. Many residents have already filed lawsuits against the company that owns the facility, the Southern California Gas Company. ... Part of the problem in stopping the leak lies in the base of the well, which sits 8,000 feet underground. Pumping fluids down into the will, usually the normal recourse, just isn't working, said [copmany spokesperson Anne] Silva. Workers have been "unable to establish a stable enough column of fluid to keep the force of gas coming up from the reservoir." The company is now constructing a relief well that will connect to the leaking well, and hopefully provide a way to reduce pressure so the leak can be plugged.
As the article notes, methane is an especially noxious gas in a figurative as well as literal sense; while it spends less time in the atmosphere than does CO2, it is more effective at trapping heat.
That would be hydrogen sulfide. Methane doesn't smell like anything. It's odorless; in fact your gas company puts a stinky compound into it so you'll know when there's a leak.
Pumping fluids down into the will, usually the normal recourse, just isn't working, said [copmany spokesperson Anne] Silva.
Great editing as always, timmay.
I believe Timothy is showing signs of hypoxia. Better evacuate him immediately.
(Typos not present in source article. Yes, I checked. Clicking through and copying text is one of my apparently-rare mutant powers.)
People forget that it is the Republicans that rule CA. The Democratic Party has no influence here.
Well it sounds like this really stinks for those residents.
Of course, the article gets that wrong (well done linking to vice of all places) and doesn't specify whether this is natural gas that has had the mercaptan added as required or if this is natural natural gas that has some other foul-smelling substance mixed. There's a typo in the summary too, but that's par for the course here.
If it's really that bad, strap a flare to a drone and fly it into the methane exhaust.
Then maybe someone will take notice and actually do something about it, rather then this bullshit "oh well, ho hum, we'll drill another well as soon as we can" business-as-usual attitude. I'm guessing the facility is fully operational and pulling in profits for SCGC, despite the insane environmental harm it's currently causing? What incentive do they actually have to fix it right now? They haven't even confirmed if the secondary well will actually do anything.
Burn it. It's far better to burn it than let it escape as methane.
Better known as 318230.
It's going to be hard for a fluid to match pressures when there's 8,000 feet of rock pushing down on the deposit, and gas tends to bubble up through fluids, expanding as the pressure goes down.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Heeeey! It's Jimmy Two Times!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Look at the prevailing atmospheric vorticity of the area, place a bunch of counter-vorticity-inducing stators around the biggest leak (just a few percent cant on them is sufficient) and light it up. The updraft will pull air in through the stators inducing continuous vorticity that will form a fire tornado miles into the atmosphere, totally oxidizing the methane and anything else that might burn in the gas.
Once the fuel supply is cut off, the vortex may be self-sustaining due to the temperature difference between the ground and the upper troposphere. This is known as an Atmospheric Vortex Engine.
To turn it off, you turn the stators straight in thereby removing the vorticity and the vortex structure dissipates into a normal updraft.
Seastead this.
Mod to +10.
Concrete is a nice fluid for this. But it will cap the well permanently, so it looks live those greedy private morons are still trying to salvage it, out of pure greed
No. An accident is when you're drunk and you think you have to fart but you end up crapping your drawers.
When a leak in your natural gas storage facility springs a leak so bad that it makes an entire California town uninhabitable and the residents seriously ill, has already dumped the greenhouse equivalent of a million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and you won't be able to stop the leak until at least March, 2016, it's a fucking crime. They should be frog-marching the CEO and Board of Directors of SoCal Gas in handcuffs right now. Let the hundreds of families that have had to leave their homes indefinitely throw rocks at their heads.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-...
You are welcome on my lawn.
This article is pretty light on details. I know some of the residents in that area, and these are things some retired engineers have passed on to me from community meetings SCGC has had with them.
This is an old (early 20th century) oil field with over 80 wells. If you've never driven around LA, you may not know that there are still operational oil fields inside the city, but think of the La Brea tar pits, and it makes sense.
All of the wells in this field were designed to pump out oil. The pipes used in the wells are larger inner diameter than typically used with methane and have thinner and more porous wall material than typically used with methane. The pipes used are perfectly fine for oil, but would not be approved for a new methane well.
SCGC uses this underground cavern emptied of oil as storage for methane for Los Angeles in lieu of constructed tanks. They can and do pump methane in and out, it's all processed and comes from somewhere else.
What they did not do is verify that this old oil field will actually hold methane before they started using it. This leak looks like the methane is going through the porous concrete pipe that makes up the well and through the surrounding rock to the surface. This is why they can't seal the leak by clogging the pipe. It seems unlikely that anything short of capping all of the wells at the bottom or pumping out the methane will stop the leaking for good. They're halfway through drilling for one well, and don't intend to start on others until they show signs of leaking. All of their sensors are at ground level, so they will have no advance notice of an imminent leak.
The local schools have been closed due to air quality issues, and a few thousand people have been temporarily moved at SCGC's expense. This leak accounts for 25% of the total expected statewide carbon emissions.
It's a disasterous waste of a resource and many people have had to be evacuated, possibly for months. Why isn't there a serious response on the federal level instead of expecting the company to do whatever they can with their own resources? A spill in the gulf was dealt with on such a level.
At the mind-boggling 110,000 pph (interesting choice of units for measuring a quantity of gas, btw) I don't know if this will be the atmospheric version of the Deep Water Horizon... There would probably be less damage overall if you'd just bought it straight from Gazprom... Sad :(
One can spend 100% of resources on attempting to get 100% perfect outcomes. The problem is, it's possible to spend 100% of your resources, it's impossible to get 100% perfect outcomes.
If you had an automobile accident that killed someone (or inadvertently set your apartment on fire and it ended up killing a neighbor, or rode your bike around a pothole and swerved into traffic and caused an accident because you didn't signal properly and someone died in that accident), I assume you would expect and welcome (and even demand, in the interests of proportionality and fairness) an even worse fate than you are proposing for the CEO and BOD of SoCal Gas. I assume this since you are proposing a fairly quick death - probably only a few hours - for temporarily inconveniencing some people, presumably your death for actually KILLING someone by accident should presumably be allowed to be a lot slower and more painful -- you should hope the family of the person(s) you killed are not too creative because they could keep you alive for years with you begging to be killed every hour of every day.
I don't think that will matter much. BP was sued after they dragged their feet capping an underwater oil well, and they still have plenty of fuck left in them.
Yup, the only recourse is to force them to give you a loan and then pay it back slowly over time. Good thinking there. Oh wait. Force them to give the government regulatory agencies money and then pay it for them. Either way, the residents (who are also most likely customers) end up paying.
Maybe this is a dumb question, but why in the world were they stockpiling that much gas to begin with?
seems like the movie 'the arrival', aliens are warming up the planet so they can take over... LOL...
I'm in favour of plugging the leak by throwing upper management into it. If that doesn't suffice, throw middle management into the leak. If it still fails, there shouldn't be anyone to complain about just burning the methane. Deterrent and solution, all rolled into one.
They should be frog-marching the CEO and Board of Directors of SoCal Gas in handcuffs right now. Let the hundreds of families that have had to leave their homes indefinitely throw rocks at their heads.
Cowboy up. The world and no one on owe you anything.
So what you're saying is that the people affected by this problem should take the law into their own hands, and string those fuckers up? Because the world and no one owes them anything, like protection from those who would attack them?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why isn't there a serious response on the federal level instead of expecting the company to do whatever they can with their own resources? A spill in the gulf was dealt with on such a level.
If you're looking for relief from FEMA, you are looking in the wrong place. We just had a fire here in NoCal called the Valley Fire. First the ARC showed up and mismanaged the refugee camps to the point that aid supplies were just lying around. They not only didn't put on enough people to handle the problem, but they actively chased away any volunteer who was not a member of the ARC and refused to let them help. This was followed up by FEMA making people apply for aid on specific dates, then telling even people who applied correctly that they had made an error and in many cases denying them any aid at all, and generally giving aid willingly only to homeowners. And lots of these people are finding that even their fire insurance plus whatever pittance (if any) they manage to wrangle out of FEMA is insufficient to rebuild. And most of them won't even be permitted to do that (as in, with a building permit) for over a year after the incident.
If you are subject to a disaster in the USA, you are well and rightly fucked. You can expect deliberately poor treatment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hell, yeah!
Its more sensible than a lot of other things that happen in Texas, and the movie rights would be worth even more than the legal fees. Unless God's legal team actually win and Texas has to pay - where is Chuck Norris when you need him?.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Don't think so. I think they gave up on that some time ago, but they can't get the concrete deep enough or keep it there long enough to set.
Methane is natural gas. In this country it's piped to homes for cooking and heating. Why can't they do that in California?
no, I don't have a sig
By my calculations, this well is about 0.3% of the world's cows methane output (according to the webs, 265 pounds per year per cow; and there are over a billion cows), or the equivalent of about 3.67 million cows. (Note: I consume meat/dairy products. Just trying to put it into perspective.)
Methane leaking from a well doesn't smell like rotten eggs, because that smell is added by the gas company before it goes into distribution.
Methane in its natural, unadulterated gaseous phase is colorless and odorless.
I just read them in the voice of the blue and pink unicorns in this documentary about Candy Mountain.
Chaaarlie! It's a magical liopleurodon, Chaaarlie! The Republicans hate liopleurodons, Chaaarlie!
Oh god, the shills are out!
There are no such things as accidents as concerns vehicles: cars, four wheel trucks, big trucks, or bicycles. There are only collisions. Not linking to the Smith System because obvious shill is obvious.
No, I'm sorry, safety fucking first. Especially as concerns an operation such as this one, there are no motherfucking accidents. This is the result of an asshole manager. (In this case, an asshole manager who even fails at gaslighting!)
So this is a storage well for natural gas, right.
Is that anything like the proposed storage wells for captured carbon dioxide? Sequestering billions of tons of carbon dioxide in undrerground in deep wells so it doesn't get into the atmosphere and cause trouble?
Methane is lighter than air and disperses quickly -- in fact it goes to the upper atmosphere where it causes the problems that it causes. So this light gas which isn't particularly toxic hangs around long enough for it's impurities to force the evacuation of 1700 homes. Now what would happen if a CO2 storage facility would have a similar blowout, of a gas that is very heavy and creeps along the ground and kills people in houses (and livestock) instead of just stinking them out?
And unlike nuclear waste that is dangerous for thousands of years, carbon dioxide is deadly forever.
Is it really such a great idea to consider storage and capture?
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
YOU insisted on swallowing the rhetoric of government == evil because you thought you'd keep more of "your" money. YOU don't get to piss and moan that government isn't wealthy enough to help when there's a disaster.
No, no I didn't, and you can anonymously eat a bag of dicks up for leaving this comment as a reply to what I wrote. I have always argued for distributed government with oversight, not against government.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
... 110,000 pounds per hour... 8,000 feet ...
We are an international audience. Many of us are engineers. Probably the majority of us are not used to thinking in the American dialect of Imperial Measures. Is it not time that we show a bit of curtesy to people and start using metric? I mean, it is not even as if anybody actually has much of an intuition of how much "110,000 pounds" is, other than "it's a lot". Metric tons we can compare to things we know - a lorry, a cubic meter of water (there was the metric again) etc. 110 kpounds? Probably about 500 t; but of course 500 doesn't sounds as big as 110,000.
BP received one of the largest fines in history for their deepwater screwup: $18.7 billion, or roughly six year's worth of declared operating profit. The investigating revealed systematic incompetence and lax safety practices, including deliberately electing not to install essential but expensive head equipment and falsifying equipment tests. Despite this few individuals have faced any serious penalty because the corporation, as corporations are intended to do, acts to shield individuals from liability. The only people who may face jail time are one engineer and two site managers - and so far only one has been sentenced, to probation. Not a single person has actually spent even one day behind bars.
A corporation as a legal entity has many purposes. One of which is to protect individual workers from liability. Turns out it's pretty good at protecting them from criminal accountability too.
Not an expert in this field, but what you are advocating would almost certainly not work for natural gas. Imagine a propane tank with an access port where you can add or remove gas (don't know if the gas is liquified at storage temperatures and pressures). If the tank springs a leak somewhere else in the tank, you are not going to be able to seal it with a fluid that falls to the bottom when you pump it in-- unless the leak is at the bottom. What you propose works when the stored fluid is about the same density as concrete but in this case, the concrete will immediately separate and fall to the bottom.
Don't get me wrong, I have no sympathy for the petroleum industry but I am sure they are trying to fix this as quickly as possible given the bad PR.
I hope this event leads to a change of the default assumption that a natural underground reservoir that held liquid hydrocarbons is automatically qualified to hold gaseous hydrocarbons. It should be necessary to test such reservoirs before pumping gas into them -- say, with air tagged with extra argon or something. If it escapes, no harm is done. It is just being done to see if the damn thing leaks.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
In the Leptov sea, substantially more methane is pouring out with no attempts being made to mitigate it.
I wonder if the "warm spot" deflecting rain and causing the drought in California could be tied to this leak.
Could you imagine if they could prove it was...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Slide a strong explosive down that well and blow it up so that the shaft collapses. No more leaks!
What makes the problem complex is that they are trying to stop the leak while keeping the well. It is a much simpler problem to stop the leak if one is willing to lose the well in the process.
We have oil wells even in Beverly Hills! This state has a horrific environmental record because of the Republicans.
Are you going to blame the Republicans for La Brea tar pits as well? Perhaps the oil wells are relieving natural pressure in the oil containing formations and are reducing environmental damaging oil seeps elsewhere; like the ocean.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Concrete is a nice fluid for this. But it will cap the well permanently, so it looks live those greedy private morons are still trying to salvage it, out of pure greed
It's a well into a natural gas storage field, they've already decided it has to be capped, it's not like it's the only well into the storage field, the leaking well was used to pump fluids into the field to maintain stable pressures. The easy fix is to drill another well to pump concrete down to the area of the leaking well to reduce pressure in the leaking well casing an then fill the leaker with concrete to seal it, i.e. cap the well permanently.
The alternative is to shutdown facility and fill it with fluid to avoid collapse and earthquakes. That would also mean that Natural gas fired power plants wouldn't be assured of sufficient gas to operate during peak consumption times and rolling blackouts.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Natural gas has NO ODOR which is why it is DANGEROUS. The smell is added when the gas is processed to alert us to a leak or a burner not lit. Other articles correctly site this.
i would say call The HellFighter but i don't know the country code for the correct section of the HereAfter.
this might be a case of try to suck the well dry and or just LIGHT IT UP.
AWG "fans" must be having generalized tonic-clonic seizures left right and center
No. An accident is when you're drunk and you think you have to fart but you end up crapping your drawers.
When a leak in your natural gas storage facility springs a leak so bad that it makes an entire California town uninhabitable and the residents seriously ill, has already dumped the greenhouse equivalent of a million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and you won't be able to stop the leak until at least March, 2016, it's a fucking crime. They should be frog-marching the CEO and Board of Directors of SoCal Gas in handcuffs right now. Let the hundreds of families that have had to leave their homes indefinitely throw rocks at their heads.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-...
Well first what are the alternatives, coal fired power plants? Here's the real skinny,
Notice that state regulators , how many rate increases to upgrade infrastructure has the state regulators turned down in the last decade? Regulated Utilities aren't like other businesses, there profits are limited to a percentage of revenues, so normally the more they spend on expenses, the more money they can't give to shareholders; unless the Regulators will not approve the rate increases.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Why don't you tell us? How many?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/se...
You are welcome on my lawn.
If a company is going to profit a million dollars an hour off of doing a certain thing, I kind of expect them to be able to handle it when things go awry and certainly not affect the lives of anyone else. When did the right for a corporation to profit also absolve them of any kind of harm or damage that they do to others?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Don't get me wrong, I have no sympathy for the petroleum industry but I am sure they are trying to fix this as quickly as possible given the bad PR.
So. Cal. Gas is also stuck paying the hotel bills of all the evacuated families. About 4,000 families have requested relocation.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
Does gas count as petroleum?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
First: You don't understand ratebase. Old utilities where the only business that could turn a profit redecorating the presidents office. So they regularly did. They were guaranteed a regulated rate of return on all legitimate business expenses.
Second: CA is a power pool. Not ratebase and hasn't been for more than a decade.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Oh, no... See, I can agree with their premise. If we starve the government then necessary programs will be cut. Of course, I've yet to see a starving US (federal or state) government that actually needed to cut those programs when there were many other programs that could have been cut or eliminated and freed up the funds for more necessary things.
So, the onus is on them to show where the government was starved. Show me a government efficiently spending, in their entirety, and I'll show you a pipe dream.
That they blame it on you is laughable, of course.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The stockpiling is storage for peak.
Natural gas use is seasonal. Depending on climate and electric generators, the peak is either during very cold weather (gas space heating) or very hot weather (high air conditioning load and gas-fired electric generation).
In either case, building large pipelines to supply the gas over a long distance so that they are large enough to meet peak demand means that those pipes are rather empty most days. That's very inefficient from a cost perspective. Instead, the long distance pipelines are medium sized -- slightly bigger than load requires on most days. During the off-season the rest of that pipeline space is used to deliver gas to the storage units. During the peak, the gas is emptied from storage right on the distribution grid, because the long distance pipelines aren't big enough to get all the needed gas to the load.
This, of course, is an overly simplistic explanation, but presents the big idea.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Sorry must have had a brain cramp, "normally the more they spend on expenses, the more money they can't give to shareholders;" should have been "normally the more they spend on expenses, the more money they can give to shareholders;"
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Whenever anyone talks about Carbon Capture and Sequestration in underground wells, refer them to the Aliso Canyon gas leaks. Leaking methane rises since it is lighter than air, but CO2 would sink to the ground and flow like water. It would drown any living thing in its path. From this we should learn that it is too dangerous to store CO2 in the ground. Eventually, we'll have a leak. If you doubt that, then consider that natural gas has market value and the 100,000 lbs or so that are leaking every hour in LA is wasting a great deal of value. If the industry can't figure out how to securely store something that has such value, why would we believe they can safely store something that they consider to have no value? (i.e. CO2).
If they can't store methane safely in underground wells, then you can't trust them to store CO2 in such wells.
Winter.