Flat natural gas inventories may portend a Southland winter chill
Natural gas inventories for Southern California have remained flat this summer instead of rising as they usually do as utilities prepare for winter.
But with the Aliso Canyon storage facility in Los Angeles County essentially taken offline, the normal inventory cycle has been upended. The site’s 114 wells are going through a series of tests in the wake of a massive leak that forced the evacuation of some 8,000 households from the nearby Porter Ranch neighborhood.
That may have major implications when winter sets in and utilities have to deal with much heavier use by residential customers.
A report released Tuesday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed inventory at about half the level of capacity for Southern California Gas Co., the primary provider of natural gas for Southern California.
“We’re definitely not through summer. We still have the two generally hottest months in front of us,” said Bret Lane, the chief operating officer for SoCalGas, a subsidiary of San Diego-based Sempra Energy. “But we’re focusing a lot on winter.”
Under normal circumstances, storage operators inject natural gas into their facilities during the summer to build up inventories in anticipation of heating needs during the winter.
SoCalGas has total capacity of 138 billion cubic feet, with Aliso Canyon’s capacity accounting for up to 86 billion cubic feet.
But Aliso’s wells are undergoing inspections after the leak that spewed the equivalent of 84,200 metric tons of methane from late October to February, and its inventory levels have been limited to 15 billion cubic feet.
Other SoCalGas storage fields have supplied natural gas inventory of about 46 billion cubic feet, but they have nearly reached their maximum combined capacity of 49 billion cubic feet.
The upshot is that the inventory for SoCalGas has remained flat, at about 61 billion cubic feet. That’s well below half of the utility’s total working storage capacity for natural gas.
Without Aliso Canyon, the ability of SoCalGas to meet demand this winter may be reduced, increasing the risk of curtailments — in particular for what are called “non-core customers,” such as manufacturers, hospitals, refineries and other large users.
“What the EIA report is corroborating is what the insiders already know, which is we’ve got a problem this winter,” said Dave Hackett, president of Stillwater Associates, an Irvine-based energy consulting company.
Inventory can be boosted by natural gas injections at Aliso Canyon, but the wells first have to get tested and approved by the California Public Utilities Commission and the Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources.
On Thursday, Dennis Arriola, chief executive of SoCalGas, said “probably sometime in September we’ll be ready to start injections” into “somewhere between 20 and 25” of Aliso’s 114 wells, provided they get approved.
“If we could get another 20 or 30 billion in the ground to give us some flexibility — obviously the more, the better,” Lane said Tuesday.
SoCalGas has been supplying information to a task force composed of officials at the PUC, California Independent System Operator, the California Energy Commission and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to help ensure system reliability this winter.
Aliso Canyon has the largest daily deliverability — the amount of gas that can be withdrawn from a storage facility each day — of all the storage facilities west of the Rockies, estimated at 1.9 billion cubic feet per day. Its limited operations during the well-testing period has strained the area’s energy system.
No blackouts have been reported this summer but Cal-ISO, the agency that oversees the power grid for much of the state, issued a statewide flex alert urging conservation in June because of a heat wave in Southern California. Another flex alert was issued in late July, but Lane said that was mainly due to hot weather in Northern California.
But the pressure on the system can be even greater during winter, when peak demand for natural gas is highest.
“For us, this just highlights once again the importance of [Aliso Canyon],” Lane said. “It plays a critical, pivotal role for us. It’s like a shock absorber when we have sudden loads that hit us.”
rob.nikolewski@sduniontribune.com
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