The following is a letter Southern California Gas sent to residents of the north San Fernando Valley, where the company has resumed injections of natural gas into its storage facility:

Dear North San Fernando Valley community member:

On July 31, SoCalGas resumed injection operations at our Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility (Aliso Canyon) to comply with the CPUC directive to maintain sufficient natural gas inventories at the field necessary to support the reliability of the region’s natural gas and electricity systems.

You can follow our progress at meeting the post-injection conditions required by State regulators here.

Due to increased demand on our system resulting from the hot weather and unplanned maintenance work on a natural gas transmission pipeline in San Bernardino County, it may be necessary to switch our operations and begin withdrawing natural gas from Aliso Canyon. Any withdrawals from the facility will be conducted in accordance with the CPUC’s summer withdrawal protocol.

We routinely switch between injections and withdrawals at our storage facilities to meet the needs of our customers, including electric generators.

If this change becomes necessary for the reasons listed above, or for other conditions that require withdrawals to support energy reliability, we will resume injections at Aliso Canyon as soon as system conditions allow, to meet the CPUC’s directive to increase inventory at the field.

As a reminder, our operations at Aliso Canyon are being held to what regulators have called the most rigorous monitoring, inspection, and safety requirements in the nation. Ongoing steps to maintain safety and accountability include:

• Continued testing or abandonment of wells that remain temporarily plugged;
• Real time pressure monitoring of all wells;
• Visual inspections of each well four times a day and daily infrared thermal imaging scans; and
• Continued operation of the fence line methane monitoring system.

With Aliso Canyon now available for limited injections and withdrawals, additional updates will be provided at socalgas.com/alisoupdates and through our community notification program.

To sign up to receive community notifications, click here.

The original letter is posted here.