A normal gas meter as viewed by a FLIR thermal imaging camera, Oct. 8, 2017. (Ingrid Lobet/inewsource)
Natural gas is leaking – sometimes deliberately – from residential gas meters up and down the state of California.
That surprise is buried in state documents, a review by inewsource has found.
The leaks don’t mean you’re in danger of an explosion. But tiny amounts of natural gas escaping from gas meters not only cost you money, they can be the largest single source of leaks for a utility, as they are for San Diego Gas & Electric.
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Renters and owners pay for this gas because utilities are allowed to charge customers for gas that is lost or unaccounted for. The bill for all that lost gas, from meters and otherwise, is about $20 million a year in California.
Dan Thomsen, whose company Building Doctors focuses on energy efficiency, said on about 25 percent of the homes he surveys, he finds a gas leak somewhere.
Sometimes the whiffs of gas even come out by design, from a part of the meter known as the pressure regulator. Every meter has one. It’s a little known fact that they burp off gas to relieve pressure.
“That needs exposing right there,” Thomsen said “By capturing those fumes, we would save a god-awful amount of things that are really, really, bad for the environment.”
Natural gas is the consumer-friendly name for methane, which is attracting more attention because of its significance for climate change. When natural gas is released, it traps heat in the air. It plays this role 84 times more powerfully than the better-known greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, when you compare short-term effects.
Most methane in California comes from livestock and landfills, not industry. But the total natural gas leaked from the gas delivery network in California in 2015 was more than the Aliso Canyon well disaster in Los Angeles. That’s enough energy to power 285,000 vehicle trips around the globe at the equator.
A quarter of all the gas leaking out of pipelines and natural gas infrastructure is estimated to be coming out near gas meters.
Gas lost at the meter was the second largest category statewide, and the largest category for SDG&E.
Those small puffs from the pressure regulator are only a tiny fraction. The California Air Resources Board estimates some 800 times that much is leaking out of pipe joints near the meter. They are not sure exactly where and have contracted to find out.
These estimates are a best guess on the part of the board, based on information it gets from utilities, and on a study done in 1996. The board uses estimates because no one routinely measures leaks at the meter.
San Diego Gas & Electric managers were more comfortable talking about leaks as a safety issue than a climate one.
Pete Zepeda, a gas operations site leader, said the company does not consider the burps from the pressure regulators to be leaks. “If equipment is functioning normally, that is not a leak,” he said. “It is not something we are being irresponsible over.”
When it comes to actual leaks, they are a high priority for SDG&E, said Scott Hazlett, the utility’s gas distribution training supervisor.
Twenty gas patrollers in specially equipped trucks scour roads in San Diego County where pipelines run underneath, looking for leaks. They do nothing else, Hazlett said. The company also has 120 customer service field employees who respond to calls when someone smells gas, he said.
Some leaks go unfixed
The main emphasis for utility companies has been identifying safety risks, not the threat to climate stability. Leaks that present no safety risk have often gone unfixed from one year to the next. More than 21,000 small leaks statewide were carried over from 2015 to 2016.
One of those could have been the leak Sean Armstrong discovered at the edge of the property he shares with his wife, three children, mother and a tenant in the small city of Arcata in Northern California. During the recession, he said, they planted blueberry bushes on a bare patch in the front yard, adding to a variety of fruit they grow. But the plants died. He planted them again. The new ones died.
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Armstrong did not know that circles of dead landscaping can be a sign that natural gas is leaking out underground. On July 13, he noticed a man walking through his yard. It turned out to be a gas company contractor who informed him a leak had been identified on the property a year earlier.
The contractor measured a gas concentration high enough to be flammable, Armstrong said. Soon after, another gas employee arrived. He judged the concentration to be lower, and the situation less urgent.
The leak was not only a scare for the family, it was also a blow. They make a conscious effort to limit their emissions.
“It’s killing me that my methane leak is polluting equal to my total CO2 production, and it’s been going on for an unknown length of time,” Armstrong posted on Facebook on July 14.
Their gas company, Pacific Gas & Electric, fixed the leak this month. The utility confirmed the dates in Armstrong’s story.
True picture may be worse
Leaks like the one at Armstrong’s are a special worry for the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit that has made methane a priority of its work.
“They are going to just continue to release methane gas into the atmosphere year after year after year,” said Virginia Palacios, who was a senior research analyst with the group in Austin, Texas, when she spoke with inewsource.
The group believes the true amount of leaked natural gas may be greater than estimates. In one collaboration with Google Earth Outreach and Colorado State University, it outfitted vehicles with especially sensitive methane sensing equipment.
“We are finding far more leaks than utilities generally find in their systems,” Palacios said.
The Google Earth Outreach teams use equipment that measures methane down to parts per billion. Utility companies, including SDG&E, traditionally look for leaks using equipment that can detect when natural gas in the air reaches parts per million.
When someone smells gas and calls the gas company, the response is prompt. Technicians categorize the leak. Grade 1 leaks pose an actual or potential hazard. They are fixed quickly. Grade 2 leaks are not hazardous at the time they’re detected but could become dangerous. These are set for repair. Grade 3 leaks are not expected to become hazardous. These are the ones that have been left for years.
Natural gas remains in the atmosphere, like a molecular warming blanket, for approximately 12 years.
Hazlett, the distribution training supervisor with SDG&E, acknowledged that the equipment the utility uses to detect escaping gas is not the most sensitive on the market. PG&E, on the other hand, has 10 SUVs outfitted with next generation equipment to spot and fix leaks.
The San Diego utility was ahead by a different measure, however. None of the 21,483 California leaks carried over from 2015 to 2016 was theirs.
“We don’t have any backlog of leaks,” Hazlett said. Not even the leaks they find and grade as 3. “We still attack those the same we attack any other leak,” he said.
A spokesman for the California Air Resources Board confirmed this.
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Gender Identity
Gender Identity
Gender Identity
Women
80%
Women
82%
Women
75%
Men
20%
Men
18%
Men
25%
Sexual Orientation
Sexual Orientation
Sexual Orientation
Straight
87%
Straight
82%
Straight
100%
LGBTQ-identifying
7%
LGBTQ-identifying
7%
Not specified
7%
Not specified
7%
Speak a language beyond English at home
33%
Speak a language beyond English at home
18%
Speak a language beyond English at home
75%
Race/Ethnicity
Race/Ethnicity
Race/Ethnicity
White
67%
White
73%
White
50%
Hispanic or Latinx
20%
Two or more races
18%
Hispanic or Latinx
50%
Two or more races
13%
Hispanic or Latinx
9%
Age
Age
Age
20-29
40%
20-29
45%
20-29
25%
30-39
47%
30-39
45%
30-39
50%
60 or older
13%
60 or older
9%
60 or older
25%
* The percentages in the charts have been rounded and may not add up to 100.
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Lorie Hearn is the chief executive officer, editor and founder of inewsource. She founded inewsource in the summer of 2009, following a successful reporting and editing career in newspapers. She retired from The San Diego Union-Tribune, where she had been a reporter, Metro Editor and finally the senior editor for Metro and Watchdog Journalism. In addition to department oversight, Hearn personally managed a four-person watchdog team, composed of two data specialists and two investigative reporters. Hearn was a Nieman Foundation fellow at Harvard University in 1994-95. She focused on juvenile justice and drug control policy, a natural course to follow her years as a courts and legal affairs reporter at the San Diego Union and then the Union-Tribune.
Hearn became Metro Editor in 1999 and oversaw regional and city news coverage, which included the city of San Diego’s financial debacle and near bankruptcy. Reporters and editors on Metro during her tenure were part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories that exposed Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham and led to his imprisonment.
Hearn began her journalism career as a reporter for the Bucks County Courier Times, a small daily outside of Philadelphia, shortly after graduating from the University of Delaware. During the decades following, she moved through countless beats at five newspapers on both coasts.
High-profile coverage included the historic state Supreme Court election in 1986, when three sitting justices were ousted from the bench, and the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris. That gas chamber execution was the first time the death penalty was carried out in California in 25 years.
In her nine years as Metro Editor at the Union-Tribune, Hearn made watchdog reporting a priority. Her reporters produced award-winning investigations covering large and small local governments. The depth and breadth of their public service work was most evident in coverage of the wildfires of 2003 and then 2007, when more than half a million people were evacuated from their homes.
Laura Wingard is the managing editor at inewsource. She has been an editor in San Diego since 2002, working at The San Diego Union-Tribune, KPBS and now inewsource. At the Union-Tribune, she served in a variety of roles including as enterprise editor, government editor, public safety and legal affairs editor, and metro editor. She directed the newspaper’s award-winning coverage of the October 2007 wildfires and the 2010 disappearance of Poway teenager Chelsea King. She also oversaw reporting on San Diego’s pension crisis.
For two years, Wingard was news and digital editor at KPBS, overseeing a team of four multimedia reporters and two web producers. She also was the KPBS liaison with inewsource and collaborated with inewsource chief executive officer and editor Lorie Hearn on investigative work by both news organizations.
Wingard also worked at the Las Vegas Review-Journal as the city editor and as an award-winning reporter covering the environment and politics. She also was the assistant managing editor for metro at The Press-Enterprise in Riverside. She earned her bachelor’s degree at California State University, Fullerton, with a double major in communications/journalism and political science.
Brad Racino is the assistant editor and a senior reporter at inewsource. He has produced investigations for print, radio and TV on topics including political corruption, transportation, health, maritime, education and nonprofits.
His cross-platform reporting for inewsource has earned more than 50 awards since 2012, including back-to-back national medals from Investigative Reporters and Editors, two national Edward R. Murrow awards, a Meyer “Mike” Berger award from New York City’s Columbia Journalism School, the Sol Price Award for Responsible Journalism, San Diego SPJ’s First Amendment Award, and a national Emmy nomination.
In 2017, Racino was selected by the Institute for Nonprofit News as one of 10 “Emerging Leaders” in U.S. nonprofit journalism.
Racino has worked as a reporter and database analyst for News21; as a photographer, videographer and reporter for the Columbia Missourian; as a project coordinator for the National Freedom of Information Coalition and as a videographer and editor for Verizon Fios1 TV in New York. He received his master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 2012.
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Ingrid Lobet is a reporter at inewsource specializing in the environment. To contact her with tips, suggestions or corrections, please email ingridlobet@inewsource.org.
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