The
Porter Ranch disaster may erase the industry’s undeserved reputation as a clean
energy source.
Until late last year, Laura Gideon’s family lived in Porter Ranch on the outskirts of Los Angeles. “We didn’t ever want to leave,” Gideon told the Associated Press. It’s “a nice gated community.”
What uprooted them from one of LA’s wealthiest pockets? They became
climate refugees when the nearby Aliso Canyon natural gas storage well sprang a
nasty leak.
Clouds of gas have billowed from the faulty well, which lacked a
subsurface shutoff valve, for three and a half months. After inhaling
nonstop plumes of methane, benzene, and other toxic chemicals, local residents
began to suffer nausea, vomiting, headaches, and nosebleeds. The disaster has
also smacked local businesses hard and eroded real estate values.
Erin Brockovich, the activist and legal researcher made famous
by an Academy-award winning film depicting her against-all-odds victory against
another California utility, lives only 30 miles away. Now working with a law
firm to help the locals file claims, she calls the Aliso Canyon leak a “BP oil spill,
just on land” — because of its magnitude, duration, and climate impact.
And that’s why this incident imperils more than the people who
live there and the bottom line of Southern California Gas Co., the local
utility that ran the well.
Just as the Gulf Coast disaster invigorated opposition to offshore oil drilling, the Porter Ranch debacle may sap the natural gas industry’s popularity. Above all, it’s exposing the fuel’s persistent reputation as “clean” and climate-friendly as a complete lie.
Environmentalists, backed by ample research, have struggled to debunk that
narrative for years.
Although burning natural gas releases less carbon dioxide than
coal or diesel, extracting and distributing it releases methane into the
atmosphere. And so do storage accidents like this one.
And methane is between 86 and 105 times as powerful as CO₂ at disrupting the climate over a
20-year period. The now common practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking,
to obtain natural gas also pollutes waterways and squanders water — a big
problem for parched California.
Environmental Defense Fund is tracking the climate damage
wrought by the broken well, which is located in a vacant oil field about a mile
and a half underground. The group calculates that the roughly 100,000 metric
tons of natural gas that escaped is the equivalent of burning nearly 900
million gallons of gasoline.
This big climate footprint is particularly troubling
because thanks to record production levels, natural gas will soon become the
nation’s top power source, eclipsing coal. Natural gas supplies have grown so fast that
U.S. prices are crashing due to oversupply. The industry wants to fix this
imbalance through exports.
Shipping the stuff overseas requires condensing natural gas into
liquid form at very high heat, using expensive infrastructure. More production
will trigger more pollution and potential leaks.
Exporting liquefied natural gas, or LNG, also depends on
persuading foreigners to buy it. But where are the customers?
Selling to Europe means competing with Russian producers. And the Russians stand ready
to block this competition by slashing their own prices. At the same time,
liquefied natural gas prices in Asia have fallen. Experts say they could plunge further as supplies outweigh demand.
In other words, the natural gas business has turned into a money-losing
venture at the same time that the fossil fuel’s real costs to people and the
planet are becoming clearer.
Capping the failed well won’t stop all the physical, emotional,
and financial distress experienced by Laura Gideon and thousands of other
Southern Californians. As she told the AP: “We’re in mourning now.”
The natural gas industry probably is too. It’s a fracking mess.
Columnist Emily
Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords, a non-profit national
editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies. OtherWords.org.