California regulators handed Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) a citation last week after the utility allegedly failed to promptly correct faults in its system used to prevent corrosion in natural gas infrastructure.

In the first quarter of 2021, the San Francisco-based utility submitted an internal review to the California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC) Safety and Enforcement Division (SED) in which it reported it had failed to demonstrate adequate cathodic protection (CP), a method used to control the corrosion of metal surfaces. 

When CP areas have been found to have below-adequate levels of protection, PG&E’s utility standard requires that they must be restored within 15 months. PG&E incurred 311 CP violations, of which 127 had low reads for more than 24 months,...