Officials with a state agency that oversees operations at Aliso Canyon natural gas facility proposed increasing the amount of natural gas that can be stored at the facility despite calls from residents and environmental groups to shut it down.
Administrators with the California Public Utilities Commission, or CPUC, said the increase is “necessary to modify the maximum storage level to protect natural gas and electricity customers from reliability and economic impacts during winter 2023-2024,” according to a proposal filed in late July.
CPUC officials wrote in the document that wholesale natural gas prices through the West from November of last year to March of this year were “historically high” and the increased capacity “could dampen natural gas and electric price volatility in the future.”
The proposal comes as residents and environmental activists have been urging state officials to shut down the Aliso Canyon facility.
“(The CPUC) have two decisions on this proceeding and both have been about raising the gas,” said Issam Najm, former president of the Porter Ranch Neighborhood Council, who has been following the fate of the storage site since the 2015 gas leak. “Here we are looking at the third decision to again raise the volume. It’s an absolute atrocity.”
The controversial facility is made up of vast underground sandstone reservoirs where SoCalGas can store billions of cubic feet of natural gas, and is one of the largest in the nation. The gas company withdraws the gas from beneath the ground in response to demand.
The disastrous gas leak went down in history as the nation’s largest-ever methane leak after sending more than 100,000 metric tons of methane and other chemicals into the air over communities in the San Fernando and Simi valleys. The same year, former Gov. Jerry Brown directed the CPUC to draft a plan to shut down the facility by 2027 — the decision which was later endorsed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Since then, the…
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