SAN FRANCISCO: Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) announced plans to sell its Pleasant Creek natural gas storage field, located in Yolo County, Calif.
The Pleasant Creek field is the smallest of four underground natural gas storage fields owned wholly or partly by PG&E. With a natural gas inventory capacity of 2.3 billion cubic feet (Bcf), the Pleasant Creek field accounts for about two percent of PG&E’s total storage inventory capacity.1 A successful sale will allow ratepayers to avoid decommissioning and remediation costs.
The Pleasant Creek storage field lies partly within the city of Winters and partly in unincorporated Yolo County. A previous owner discovered the field and operated it from 1948 to 1958 as a natural gas production field. PG&E acquired the field in 1958 and began operating it as a natural gas storage field in 1960.
The Pleasant Creek storage field consists of approximately 400 acres of land, an additional 2,167 acres of subsurface rights, six injection and withdrawal wells, compression and processing facilities, as well as pipeline infrastructure that connects the field to PG&E’s gas transmission system.
Several factors led PG&E to a determination that the Pleasant Creek field is no longer a necessary asset for providing safe, reliable natural gas service to customers, including PG&E’s assessment of future gas demand and the existence of ample storage capacity at PG&E’s other gas storage fields.
In its 2019 Gas Transmission and Storage (GT&S) Rate Case at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), PG&E proposed a reliability-focused storage service strategy, which was approved. This proposal included the sale or decommissioning of the Pleasant Creek field. In the event of a successful sale, the facility will not be decommissioned by PG&E.
The proposed sale is not related to bankruptcy, from which PG&E emerged this past July.
Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a subsidiary of PG&E Corporation (NYSE:PCG), is one of the largest combined natural gas and electric energy companies in the United States. Based in San Francisco, with more than 23,000 employees, the company delivers some of the nation’s cleanest energy to 16 million people in Northern and Central California. www.pge.com