Tuesday, January 26th, 2016

California Gas Leak Exposes Growing Natural-Gas Risks

Author: Richard Martin
Source: MIT Technology Review
Publication Date: January 19, 2016
Link: California Gas Leak Exposes Growing Natural-Gas Risks

Stephan: An alarm is ringing in another sector of our aging infrastructure -- beware of a coming crisis. The failure of both corporations and the government to maintain infrastructure, largely as a result of the drive by Republicans to make government "smaller" and corporations less subject to oversight is about to bear bitter fruit. As with Flint, Michigan or the substandard oil trains that keep exploding, incompetence, stupidity, and bias on the part of conservatives has left America in a deeply compromised situation.

A woman holds a sign while attending a public hearing on January 16 regarding the massive natural-gas leak near Porter Ranch, California.

Since it was first detected on October 23, 2015, the natural-gas leak at Aliso Canyon, a Southern California Gas Co. storage facility in the bucolic Porter Ranch community, has spewed more than 86,000 metric tons of methane into the atmosphere. On Monday So Cal Gas said it has abandoned a plan to capture and burn off the gas, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. That means a solution to the disaster is still weeks, if not months, off. (This long feature on Newsweek.com explores in detail the background of the leak.)

The Porter Ranch accident highlights a growing problem in the U.S.: as natural gas replaces coal as a key energy source, the dangers of leaks and explosions from aging pipelines and storage facilities […]

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