The big fossil fuel 'battery' beneath our feet
Plus: Lots more local climate stories inside.
Welcome back to The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, a weekly newsletter on local & state climate action.
I’m Taylor Kate Brown and this newsletter grows by word-of-mouth. Someone share or forward this edition with you? Sign up here. You can also read and share this edition online.
(A map of gas storage fields, shaded to show the percentage of wells in each field that potentially have a risky, single point of failure designs, from recent paper in Geoenergy Science and Engineering by Greg Lackey, Mumbi Munda-Howe and Natalie J Peckney)
Last week for paid members, I shared an overview of new rules and efforts pushing to prevent methane leaks from the gas and oil industry. There’s a lot of energy, no pun intended, around these projects because methane drives a lot of warming, and stopping leaks should - in theory at least — be a win for both the climate and for the fossil fuel industry. In other words, a low-hanging, but essential fruit.
For a few months now, I’ve been working on a story about a rare but extreme category of methane leaks: blowouts from underground gas storage. Long time readers of The Planet You Save will remember previous editions discussing 2022’s worst “climate disaster” in the US — a gas storage blowout in western Pennsylvania that ended up erasing the climate gains from half of all the EVs sold in the US that year.
But 2022 wasn’t the first time that happened: major leaks happened in Aliso Canyon in California in 2015 and Kansas in 2001 with far more serious local impacts. I wanted to know how likely it was something these massive gas blowouts could happen again, and what was being done to prevent it.
There’s a couple ways into that question, but two things stood out right away as I began reporting: underground gas storage is really important to our current system of using gas to power electricity and heating homes, and in some cases, wells from these underground geologic fields are very, very close to large neighborhoods.
“There are a few gas storage fields in Ohio that really scare me,” Drew Michanowicz, a researcher who has been studying this issue for nearly a decade, told me, specifically because of their proximity to dense suburban neighborhoods.
But the gas is underground, so why are we freaked out?
According to a new report, there are thousands more potential opportunities for a similar situation across the country. The new analysis of data collected by federal regulators suggests there are as many as 11,446 storage wells in the country with the same key risk as the wells that failed at Rager Mountain and Aliso Canyon: They have only a single barrier to failure.
That number is actually more than 60% of all gas storage wells in the US, and more than 80% of wells that actively transport gas through them each season. Because there are only about 400 gas storage sites total, and multiple wells per field, the number of gas storage sites that don’t have at least one well with this potential issue is relatively small.
Part of the reason we know this information at all is because after Aliso Canyon, regulators started collecting data on these storage fields and their wells for the first time. Before 2017, that data — and minimum safety standards on the federal level — were nonexistent.
Read more at the story here, as well as check out a map of where these storage sites are located. For journalism heads and data nerds, I’ve also successfully done a public records request of the full root-cause analysis of what happened Rager Mountain, and you can find the underlying PHMSA data set about gas storage wells here.
P.S. This story only happened because I applied to, and was granted, seed funding from The Fund for Investigative Journalism.
More local climate action stories
- Minneapolis solar nonprofit is proving patience can bring results to lower-income residents (Energy News Network)
- New Mexico land management office scraps fossil fuel regulations, baffling everyone (Capital & Main)
- Major US business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, have sued California seeking to overturn a new state law that requires companies with more than $500m in revenue to publicly report their greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risks(Associated Press)
- Colorado oil and gas regulators reject two drilling plans deemed too close to people and pronghorns (Colorado Sun)
- Community solar projects coming to Illinois (Inside Climate News)
- Massachusetts drivers will save money charging EVs at night — but when and how much? (Energy News Network)
- Oregon makes an investment in trapping carbon in soil through agriculture (Oregon Public Broadcasting)
- Environmentalists demand Northeast governors oppose gas pipeline expansion project (WBUR)
- Michigan plans big spending to insulate homes. But can it find contractors? (Bridge Michigan)