Mindful Decommissioning of Natural Gas Infrastructure
Status
Active
Background
To help meet its clean energy goals, California is exploring strategic decommissioning of the state’s gas distribution pipelines. The state seeks to prioritize community interests and needs with a focus on equitable and just outcomes while also considering safety needs and complex logistics. To understand and balance these needs, the California Energy Commission funded the Mindful Gas Decommissioning team to develop an interactive tool to assess the 100,000 miles of gas distribution pipelines throughout the state.
The California Energy Commission (CEC) has funded the DNV and UCLA teamsto conduct thisresearch project to collect and visualize data that can help to develop a scalable, systematic approach to screen for promising candidate decommissioning sites within the state’s distribution gas pipelines. (The scope of this project does not include gas transmission pipelines nor production facilities or sites.)
Scope
The Mindful Gas Decommissioning team is collecting data based on factors such as physical condition of pipelines, gas network characteristics, energy resilience, costs of decommissioning to customers, how energy, health and economically burdened communities will be affected, and how to decommission safely and equitably, among many others.
Results
The team will use the research data to build a mapping tool that can geospatially (visually) show the pros and cons of gas decommissioning across different geographical regions of the state.