Mindful Decommissioning: A Data-Driven Tool for Prioritizing Strategic Gas Asset Decommissioning
DNV GL USA, Inc.
Recipient
Dublin, OH
Recipient Location
$770,382
Amount Spent
Active
Project Status
Project Update
The research team showcased the Gas Distribution System Screening Tool for Exploration of Equitable Decommissioning in California. The tool was designed to support the state in its ability to screen for promising sites for decommissioning gas assets. The team provided a preview of the tool and its core functionalities, highlighting the potential applications of the tool, exploring how those applications align with current and future gas-decommissioning related policy, and discussed potential future use of the tool through case studies. The project is scheduled to conclude in March 2026.
The Issue
The state of California is committed to decarbonizing its energy system. Decreasing reliance on fossil fuels is an important part of the strategy for achieving this goal. The gas network provides fossil fuels to residential, commercial, and industrial customers through transmission and distribution pipelines. If a substantial fraction of customers separates from this system without strategic decommissioning of gas pipelines, there could be considerable negative financial impacts on the customers remaining on the network. Further, impacts of gas decommissioning—including health, safety, and energy resilience considerations—will depend on factors that may be heterogeneously distributed across the state, based upon community characteristics, local access to clean energy, and other geospatial attributes. The focus of the project is to quantify these factors and present them in a visual, data-driven tool that enables examination of the factors to understand the impacts as factors receive different weights.
Project Innovation
The project will develop a scalable, systematic approach to screen for promising candidate gas decommissioning sites. The approach will be operationalized through a tool intended to support Californian’s goal of decarbonizing the energy system by 2045. The project will adopt a GIS-based Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (GIS-MCDA) framework to support development of the Data-Driven Tool. This is a well-established analytical methodology that systematically combines a set of geospatial data layers, each representing an independent decision criterion/factor, to inform complex, multi-dimensional, geographic site screening.
Project Goals
Project Benefits
By illuminating geospatial dependence of risks and benefits based on gas asset decommissioning and operator costs, as well as measures for energy equity that impact ratepayers in their communities, the tool will support prioritizing potential sites for consideration by future decarbonization activities. Because it will facilitate examination of potential economic impacts of decommissioning, the tool will contribute to cost management of California’s energy transition.
Affordability
By incorporating data that includes the potential changes in costs of energy and costs per customer to maintain the gas network as it is in the process of decommissioning, the project will provide insight into maintaining affordability of the gas system for both users and utilities.
Equity
Through assessment of impacts and engagement with non-profit groups, community-based organizations, and other stakeholders, the data-driven tool will provide insight into impacts and concerns related to gas system decommissioning on energy equity.
Economic Development
The tool will support understanding of economic development by helping identify candidate segments of gas assets to decommission according to operating cost (vs. decommissioning cost), net expected greenhouse gas reduction, and community impact.
Energy Security
By combining various data sources, the tool aims to provide better understanding of the significant dependencies on the gas system, how they may be impacted by decommissioning of segments of the gas system, and helps identify vulnerabilities that need to be protected from disruptions.
Safety
While also supporting understanding of the impacts on the rate bases to customers, the tool will support maintenance of gas asset safety by helping assess how decommissioning of gas assets can be optimized to assets most in need of repair or replacement from a safety and reliability standpoint.
Key Project Members
Valerie Nibler
Cici Vu
Subrecipients
The Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Los Angeles Campus
Match Partners
DNV
