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| Type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Industry | Utilities |
| Founded | 1867 |
| Headquarters | , United States |
Key people | Scott Drury, CEO |
| Products | Natural Gas |
| Parent | Sempra |
| Website | http://www.socalgas.com/ |
The Southern California Gas Company (trading as SoCalGas) is a utility company based in Los Angeles, California, and a subsidiary of Sempra. It is the primary provider of natural gas to Los Angeles and Southern California.
Its headquarters are located in the Gas Company Tower in downtown Los Angeles. [1]
SoCalGas provides natural gas service for approximately 21.6 million customers, spanning roughly 20,000 square miles of California, extending from Visalia in the north to the Mexican border in the south. [2] Gas service for San Diego County is provided by sister utility San Diego Gas & Electric, and Southwest Gas and the Long Beach Gas & Oil Department (LBGO) carve out small portions of the Southern California area for natural gas delivery.
The company provides gas service for all or part of the following counties:
This gas company's roots trace back to the 1800s when new settlers arrived in Los Angeles in search of a new frontier. In 1867, Los Angeles Gas Company, the forerunner of today's Southern California Gas Company, installed 43 new gas lamps along Main Street. [3] The gas lighting business was run by five entrepreneurs who manufactured the gas from asphalt, a tar-like substance, and later from oil.
The company was enjoying modest success until Thomas Edison introduced his electric light in 1879. With the future of the gas lamp business uncertain, the company began looking for other uses for gas, and Los Angeles soon had its first gas stove and heater. Meanwhile, Pacific Enterprises was looking to expand its gas business. Founded in San Francisco in 1886 as Pacific Lighting, the company bought several small gas manufacturing and distribution companies in the area, including the Los Angeles Gas Company in 1890. These companies ultimately became Southern California Gas Company.
By the early 20th century, natural gas —a colorless, odorless gas found in association with oil underground—was starting to gain attention. The breakthrough came with the discovery of the Buena Vista Oil Field near Taft, California in 1909, which included a huge reservoir of natural gas. Since natural gas had twice the heating value of manufactured gas, the company took the bold step to convert its system to natural gas and build pipelines throughout the state. Natural gas was soon found throughout the country, and demand for the fuel was rapidly growing. To meet customer demand, the company began storing gas in large holding tanks. In 1941, the company introduced a new system to the Southwest United States: underground storage of natural gas. By 2016, the company had four separate underground storage facilities, all of them depleted oil and gas fields repurposed as gas storage. The four are, in order from largest to smallest, the Aliso Canyon field, north of Porter Ranch; Honor Rancho, near Newhall; the La Goleta Gas Field adjacent to Goleta; and the Playa del Rey storage facility, north of Playa del Rey, near the Los Angeles International Airport. [4]
As Southern California's population grew, so too, did the company, eventually becoming the nation's largest natural gas distribution utility, serving 19.5 million people through 5.5 million gas meters in more than 530 communities. Headquartered in Los Angeles, Southern California Gas Company is a subsidiary of Sempra, a Fortune 500 company based in San Diego. Its service area encompasses 23,000 sq mi (60,000 km2) of diverse terrain throughout most of Central and Southern California, from just south of Sanger to the Mexican border.
In late 2012, the company began the Advanced Meter Installation (AMI) Project that consists of upgrading over 6 million gas meters with the new Advanced Meter communication device. This device is attached to an analog gas meter that automatically and securely transfers gas usage information to the company's customer service and billing centers. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has approved a budget of $1.05 billion for this project, which is expected to be completed in 2017.
On March 6, 2019, SoCalGas announced a plan to replace 20 percent of its traditional natural gas supply with renewable natural gas (RNG) by 2030. SoCalGas' aims to be the cleanest natural gas utility in North America, which it plans to achieve by delivering increasingly renewable energy to its customers. [5] As part of this effort, SoCalGas has partnered with startup Twelve to convert CO2 from raw biogas into methane. [6]
A gas leak from the underground Aliso Canyon gas storage started in October 2015 releasing methane uncontrollably. By December 2015, thousands of people from Porter Ranch had been temporarily relocated and the leak had added more than 150 million pounds of methane to the atmosphere. [7] [8] The NGO Environmental Defense Fund has called the incident "unprecedented for California" and compared the leak's continuous output of greenhouse gas emissions to that of 7 million cars or "8 or 9 coal-fired plants". [9] The 20-year climate impact of this leak is estimated to be the same as burning a billion gallons of gasoline. [10] The incident has been called "the biggest environmental disaster since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill" by journalists. [11]
The company has advocated for mixing biogas into existing natural gas pipelines. However, California state officials have taken the position that biogas is "better used in hard-to-electrify sectors of the economy-- like aviation, heavy industry and long-haul trucking." [12]
El Paso Natural Gas (EPNG) is an American company with a system of natural gas pipelines that brings gas from the Permian Basin in Texas and the San Juan Basin in New Mexico and Colorado to West Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, California, and Arizona. It also exports some natural gas to Mexico.
Kinder Morgan, Inc. is one of the largest energy infrastructure companies in North America. The company specializes in owning and controlling oil and gas pipelines and terminals.
The Consolidated Steel Corporation was an American steel and shipbuilding business. Consolidated built ships during World War II in two main locations: Wilmington, California and Orange, Texas. It was created in 1929 by the merger of Llewellyn Iron Works, Baker Iron Works and Union Iron Works, all of Los Angeles. The company entered the shipbuilding business in 1939. In 1948, now a pioneer producer of large-diameter pipelines, Consolidated Steel was renamed Consolidated Western Steel and acquired by U.S. Steel and operated as a wholly-owned subsidiary. The San Diego-based Consolidated Aircraft Corp. is not related and neither is the Union Iron Works of San Francisco. The company did not produce steel, neither from iron ores nor from pig iron, but rather fabricated standard steel mill product into steel products. In the 1950s the company contributed ground equipment to the Project Nike missile system. In 1964 Consolidated was merged into the American Bridge Division of U.S. Steel.
Sempra is a North American public utility holding company based in San Diego, California. The company is one of the largest utility holding companies in the United States with nearly 40 million consumers. Sempra's focus is on electric and natural gas infrastructure and its operating companies include: Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) in Southern California; Oncor Electric Delivery Company; and Sempra Infrastructure, with offices in California.
The Refugio oil spill on May 19, 2015, deposited 142,800 U.S. gallons of crude oil onto one of the most biologically diverse areas of the West Coast of the United States. The corroded pipeline blamed for the spill closed indefinitely, resulting in financial impacts to the county estimated as high as $74 million as it and a related pipeline remained out of service for three years. The cost of the cleanup was estimated by the company to be $96 million with overall expenses including expected legal claims and potential settlements to be around $257 million.
The Aliso Canyon gas leak was a massive natural gas leak in the Santa Susana Mountains near Porter Ranch, Los Angeles, California. Discovered on October 23, 2015, gas was escaping from a well within the Aliso Canyon underground storage facility. This second-largest gas storage facility of its kind in the United States belongs to the Southern California Gas Company, a subsidiary of Sempra Energy. On January 6, 2016, Governor Jerry Brown issued a state of emergency. On February 11, the gas company reported that it had the leak under control. On February 18, state officials announced that the leak was permanently plugged.
The La Goleta Gas Field is a natural gas field in unincorporated Santa Barbara County, California, adjacent to the city of Goleta. Discovered in 1929, and first put into production in 1932, it has been in continuous use ever since, producing approximately 12 billion cubic feet of gas. With production declining, the field was converted into a gas storage reservoir in 1941. As of 2016 it remains one of the four gas storage facilities maintained by Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas), a division of Sempra Energy, with the others being Aliso Canyon, Honor Rancho and Playa del Rey. It is the oldest storage facility of the four and the third largest, with a maximum capacity of 21.5 billion cubic feet. The storage facilities are necessary to balance load for the over ten million customers of SoCalGas: during summer months, when gas usage is at a minimum, gas is pumped into the reservoirs; and in the winter when usage is high, gas is withdrawn. The La Goleta field serves the northern portion of SoCalGas's geographic range.
The Aliso Canyon Oil Field is an oil field and natural gas storage facility in the Santa Susana Mountains in Los Angeles County, California, north of the Porter Ranch neighborhood of the City of Los Angeles. Discovered in 1938 and quickly developed afterward, the field peaked as an oil producer in the 1950s, but has remained active since its discovery. One of its depleted oil and gas producing formations, the Sesnon-Frew zone, was converted into a gas storage reservoir in 1973 by the Southern California Gas Company, the gas utility servicing the southern half of California. This reservoir is the second-largest natural gas storage site in the western United States, with a capacity of over 86 billion cubic feet of natural gas. Currently it is one of four gas storage facilities owned by Southern California Gas, the others being the La Goleta Gas Field west of Santa Barbara, Honor Rancho near Newhall, and Playa del Rey.
The Honor Rancho Oil Field is an approximately 600-acre oil field and natural gas storage facility in Los Angeles County, California, on the northern border of the Valencia neighborhood of Santa Clarita, near the junction of Interstate 5 and westbound California State Route 126. Discovered in 1950 and quickly developed, the field's oil production peaked in the 1950s, but remains productive in 2016. In 1975 Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas), the gas utility serving Southern California, began using one of its depleted oil producing zones, the Wayside 13 zone, as a gas storage reservoir, and it became the second-largest in their inventory after the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility. The field shares part of its extent with the Peter J. Pitchess Detention Center, which includes a maximum-security prison.
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