Leaking

Regional air quality regulators on Tuesday filed a lawsuit in state Superior Court in Los Angeles against Sempra Energy’s Southern California Gas Co. (SoCalGas), alleging negligence by the nation’s largest gas-only utility in the handling of a three-month-old leaking natural gas storage well.

Williams said Tuesday it had reduced the pressure in its leaking storage cavern in Eminence, MS, to allow gas to be flared rather than vented into the atmosphere. The facility serves Williams’ Transco pipeline.

Shares of BP plc took a roller coaster ride last week while the estimate of the amount of oil its leaking Macondo well has spewed into the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) was on the ascent.

As work continues to plug the leaking BP plc oil well in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), the American Petroleum Institute (API) said Tuesday the oil and natural gas industry has formed two task forces to address the short- and long-term issues related to offshore equipment and operating practices.

ConocoPhillips Alaska Inc. on Tuesday continued its clean-up of a 111,300-gallon spill of produced water at its Kuparuk field on the North Slope after a leaking pipeline was discovered late Saturday. After Prudhoe Bay, Kuparuk is the second largest oil and gas field in Alaska.

The BP-operated Pascagoula (MS) Plant has informed Destin Pipeline that a full plant shutdown will be required Tuesday to replace a leaking upstream valve. The processing outage will begin at 9 a.m. CST and is expected to last no more than 12 hours. The Destin gas stream is rich enough that it must be processed to meet quality specs of downstream pipes, a spokesman said, so Destin operators will have to shut in during the plant work. Current throughput is down to about 500 MMcf/d because of some producer maintenance, so the plant outage will affect about 250 MMcf that day. An earlier Destin bulletin board posting had said the plant work was set for Monday, but it was decided early Thursday afternoon to wait until Tuesday in an effort to accommodate producer interests, the spokesman said.

City officials in Hutchinson, KS continue their investigationafter a suspected leaking natural gas storage cavern caused twoexplosions in mid-January, leveling businesses and killing one manand injuring his wife.