[1] SoCalGas provides natural gas service for approximately 21.6 million customers, spanning roughly 20,000 square miles of California, extending from Visalia in the north to the Mexican border in the south.

The breakthrough came with the discovery of the Buena Vista Oil Field near Taft, California in 1909, which included a huge reservoir of natural gas.

The four are, in order from largest to smallest, the Aliso Canyon field, north of Porter Ranch; Honor Rancho, near Newhall; the La Goleta Gas Field adjacent to Goleta; and the Playa del Rey storage facility, north of Playa del Rey, near the Los Angeles International Airport.

Its service area encompasses 23,000 sq mi (60,000 km2) of diverse terrain throughout most of Central and Southern California, from just south of Sanger to the Mexican border.

SoCalGas aims to be the cleanest natural gas utility in North America, which it plans to achieve by delivering increasingly renewable energy to its customers.

[7][8] The NGO Environmental Defense Fund has called the incident "unprecedented for California" and compared the leak's continuous output of greenhouse gas emissions to that of 7 million cars or "8 or 9 coal-fired plants".

However, California state officials have taken the position that biogas is "better used in hard-to-electrify sectors of the economy-- like aviation, heavy industry and long-haul trucking.