Controversial oil drilling resumes off Calif. coast as gas prices spike

Gov. Gavin Newsom, California State Parks and environmental groups are clapping back in the wake of the Trump administration’s decision to allow oil drilling once more off the coast of Santa Barbara using a corroded pipeline that caused the 2015 Refugio oil spill — one of the worst environmental disasters in the state in decades. 

On Friday, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright invoked the Defense Production Act to allow Texas-based Sable Offshore to start up operations again off the Santa Barbara coast.

“Today’s order will strengthen America’s oil supply and restore a pipeline system vital to our national security and defense, ensuring that West Coast military installations have the reliable energy critical to military readiness,” Wright said in a released statement, citing President Donald Trump’s “Adjusting Certain Delegations Under the Defense Production Act” executive order, signed the day before.

Newsom immediately condemned the move, calling Wright’s decision “desperate, reckless, and illegal.”

“The move is Trump’s political attempt to point the finger at California to divide and distract the American people from his wartime failures and the massive spike in oil and gasoline prices his war has caused,” his office said in a statement on Friday, noting the production of oil here would be a “drop in the bucket.” The statement cited a Bloomberg study that reported production at the site “would have no impact on lowering global oil prices.”

California State Parks denied Sable’s application to use Gaviota State Park as an easement for the pipeline on Saturday, and ordered it to remove a 4-mile section of pipeline that runs through the park. 

“If Sable does not formally respond within 10 days with plans for removal of the pipeline segment within Gaviota State Park,” Tara Lynch, chief counsel for State Parks, wrote in a letter dated March 14 and addressed to Stephen Laperouse, a vice president at Sable Offshore, “State Parks will pursue legal action to defend the State’s property rights, and State Parks reserves the right to take all appropriate legal action in the interim.”

Despite Newsom’s and State Parks’ protest, by Monday morning, Sable officials had confirmed that drilling had already restarted off the Santa Barbara coast. 

Environmental groups also jumped in the fray Monday. 

The Center for Biological Diversity decried the move to open up the coastline for drilling and questioned the timing of the restart, which went from clearance from the Trump administration to reactivating the pipeline in less than 72 hours. 

“We definitely have suspicions about the coordinations between Sable and the White House,” Brady Bradshaw, a spokesperson from the Center for Biological Diversity, told SFGATE on Monday. 

Beyond looking into a possible connection between the Trump administration and the oil corporation, the more immediate issue, Bradshaw, said, is around the environmental impact opening drilling on a corroded pipeline could have — both short- and long-term — along with the administration’s ill-preparedness to deal with those impacts. 

“The Trump administration really doesn’t have any business with this project at all,” he concluded. “They have very little background understanding of this coastal area and wildlife impacts in the past. We’re really concerned this is all about an attack on California and really not about national security at all.”