Nearly 2,700 Natural Gas Storage Wells Are at Risk for a Major Leak

"Across the country, companies keep extra natural gas in aging underground wells that weren't originally designed for such storage."

"In October of 2015, an aging underground natural gas storage well, located in the Aliso Canyon Oil Field in Los Angeles County, blew out and began spewing its contents into the air. Four months passed before operators were able to plug the leak; during that time, 8,000 local families from the nearby Porter Ranch neighborhood had to evacuate. It's thought that the leak sent up to 109,000 metric tons of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere—roughly equivalent to the annual methane emissions of the entire Los Angeles Basin. The Aliso Canyon Oil Field methane leak would go on to become the largest of its kind in American history.

The catastrophe got Drew Michanowicz, a research fellow at Harvard University, wondering: Were the conditions that led to the Aliso Canyon well failure really all that unique? After about a year of gathering data on all of America's underground natural gas storage wells, Michanowicz and his team of Harvard environmental health and law researchers arrived at an answer: no.

The team identified more than 14,000 active gas storage wells across America. One in five of them, or about 2,700, may be at risk for leaking because—like the failed Aliso Canyon well—they probably weren't originally designed to store natural gas, and were constructed before 1979, when important modern building techniques became widespread in the gas industry. Two hundred and ten of those wells were built before 1917, and so may be missing numerous safety features."

Francie Diep reports for Pacific Standard May 25, 2017.