Federal Power Meets California Resistance in Santa Ynez Oil Restart Battle
President Trump issued a Defense Product Act-based executive order to get oil flowing again off the California coast. State judge basically ruled a previous California court injunction against offshore oil drilling superseded that EO.
Last month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order authorizing the Secretary of the Department of Energy to greenlight Sable Offshore oil company’s ongoing efforts to restart production at the much-fought-over Santa Ynez Unit off the coast near Santa Barbara, California.
Energy Secretary Christ Wright quickly followed up by doing exactly that.
“Today’s order will strengthen America’s oil supply and restore a pipeline system vital to our national security and defense, ensuring that the West Coast military installations have the reliable energy critical to military readiness,” Wright stated.
…Friday’s presidential executive order and action of the Energy Secretary come shortly on the heels of the lengthy Department of Justice legal opinion concluding that the restart of Sable Offshore’s plant falls within the scope and jurisdiction of the Defense Production Act. The restart action flies in the face of opinions rendered by the California Attorney General and the Office of the State Fire Marshal. Last October, the Fire Marshal issued a ruling decreeing that Sable had not yet done enough repair work on a pipeline that spilled 142,000 gallons of crude in a leak in 2015. That spill was due to systemic corrosion to the pipeline.
This basically opened an oil spigot that had been shut off by a California court’s previous order halting oil production in this region. Sable considered the Defense Production Act-based executive order to have trumped the state’s ruling.
Empowered by this move and in response to escalating gasoline prices (including historic ones in the Golden State high enough to get Democrats to rescind the gas tax), Sable began pumping out 60,000 barrels of oil daily. As an added bonus, 100 jobs were created with more hires slated for the near future.
During an exclusive visit to the newly reopened platforms, where oil is once again flowing through onshore pipelines in Santa Barbara following a Trump executive order, The California Post sat down with the facility’s executive, who offered a pointed but measured response to the Democrat outcry at the decision, which is still facing legal action to shut it down again.
“We have a perfect, safe restart of the pipeline,” J. Caldwell Flores, president and COO of Sable Offshore Corp., told The Post.
“We recognize we’re providing a necessary service to California and the country as a whole.”
About 100 new jobs have already been created, and an additional 200 are expected once all three platforms are fully operational, according to Sable.
However, a state judge has decided she has more power than the President when it comes to the nation’s energy security.
Oil development off Santa Barbara County’s Gaviota Coast has long turned on fine legal margins — interstate versus intrastate, State Fire Marshal versus the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, court orders versus claims of immunity. On Friday morning, in the Santa Barbara courtroom of Judge Donna Geck, one of those margins snapped into focus.
Geck refused to lift the injunction blocking Sable Offshore Corp. from restarting its pipeline system — even as oil continues to flow.
That alone might sound like just procedural sparring, but this time, the ruling did something new: It rejected, for the first time, Sable’s argument that a federal order issued under the Defense Production Act allows it to sidestep state law and the court’s prior orders.
“This is the first time a court has recognized that the Defense Production Act order does not relieve Sable of its requirements under state law,” said Talia Nimmer, staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD).
Sable Offshore Corp. plans to fight this ruling vigorously. It also plans to continue pumping oil.
The oil giant vowed to fight the “show-cause” process in court next month and pointed out it had been given the green light to reopen by the president.
Judge Donna Geck of the Santa Barbara Superior Court said last week a state injunction on the gas giant was still in place, blocking it from restarting and handing a win to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Jeffrey Dintzer, attorney for Sable Offshore, told the California Post: “We’re disappointed that the court chose not to rescind the order.
…“The pipeline is still operational, and we are continuing to pump crude through the Santa Ynez system pursuant to the order of Secretary Wright who is authorized by the president.”
Hot Air’s John Sexton has a few thoughts on how this legal battle will continue:
Judge Geck has set a hearing for next month to decide whether to hold the company in contempt of court. Hopefully a higher court will correct Judge Geck on appeal. Then again, it’s possible the emergency, in the form of the war with Iran, will be over before this gets sorted out.
The clash unfolding off the coast of Santa Barbara is more than a regional permitting dispute. It’s more like a live test of whether federal authority on energy security carries any real weight when it collides with California’s regulatory regime. For now, Sable is operating in a legal gray zone where oil is flowing, jobs are materializing, and gasoline relief is tangible, despite a state court insisting none of it should be happening.
Once again, California finds itself in the familiar position of needing the very energy infrastructure its political leadership keeps trying to shut down, and the contradictions are getting harder to ignore.
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Californians deserve to pay $10/gal at the pump, no wait, $20 because they are really stupid.
See, you start with the baseline, like most, that any of California’s elections are legitimate.
By the time you get to judges, elections don’t matter.
Commiefornia is in a death spiral as a viable State. In debt, projects to nowhere, cronies of demonrats being the only beneficiaries. Nothing more than a gigantic money laundering operation for the benefit of the demonrat party.
its our own
straits of whoremuzz
Doesn’t the supremacy clause in the Constitution override state law,in this case?
But do they collide? Does Trump’s order say Santa Ynez may restart, or that it must restart? And is California saying they cannot restart, or that until environmental approval or whatever is given by the state, that they cannot restart?
I’m leaning towards DPA overriding state law IF there’s a direct conflict, but it may take a while to work through the courts, and state Democrat courts may rule differently to federal. I’m also unclear how much direct precedent exists – politics wasn’t so divisive in past decades!
Wondering what kind of precedent might be set by all these legal challenges if they happen to win one.
It would be nice to see it come back and hit the dems in the ash.
Maybe someone could file a lawsuit that windmills and solar panels create too much pollution just in the manufacture and thus they should be banned.
The judge is saying that the company is able to comply with both.
The federal order says: “Sable is directed to immediately prioritize and allocate pipeline transportation services for hydrocarbons from the SYU through the SYPS, including transportation service activities at the onshore facilities in Las Flores Canyon, California, to the Pentland Station terminal in Pentland, California.”
The judge held that “prioritize and allocate” means consistent with all other laws. “The DPA order, by itself, does not permit the violation of applicable state regulatory law — for example, no one suggests that Sable could steal materials or money to fulfill a DPA order without state law consequence.”
So just as it can’t steal in order to fulfill the DPA order, it also can’t violate a federal consent decree that says it can’t restart production without first obtaining all necessary permits and giving the court 10 days’ notice.
She also pointed out that since it’s a federal consent decree, preemption doesn’t even enter the picture. The DPA doesn’t preempt binding federal decrees.
Adding oil pumping in California is not going to do much as the Dems leading California have for years have worked to shut down oil refining to the point they have only 7 refining stations and they some are shutting down.
In the time ahead California needs more diesel, jet fuel, oil, and gas. The Dems are trying to push people into battery cars but California has problems with lack of electricity. So over time California will lack all types of energy.
DemoncRats want more and more things to be electrified while effectively supplying less and less electricity, yet they refuse to see the impossible course they are plotting.
And just who is funding the eco-whacko watermelons (green on the outside, communist red on the inside) who are using deranged lawfare to fight this?
Note the presence of the CBD (Center for Biological Diversity), and their funding sources (massively collectivist/left-wing):
https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/center-for-biological-diversity/
In the early 60s, my parents bought a lot in Goleta across the street from lots overlooking the ocean. There was lots of tar that seeped out of the ground and wound up on the beach. I remember a large cube of tar, probably 3 feet or more in height, width, and length. That was before they started pumping oil. So, pumping out oil reduced pressure and helped the environment.
It’s not about the environment, it’s about control.
I had an in-law with riverfront property, who was gigged for restoring a shoreline that storm erosion had worn away. The same shoreline, 10 years previously, wasn’t an environmental problem, but suddenly it was now.
As far as inter- vs intrastate goes, petroleum products are fungible, just as money is. That’s the exact rationale Congress has used to see federal interests in the lives of the individual States. They can’t have it both ways. Either everything is federal because interstate commerce makes it so, or the individual States do have their individual rights and Congress has to stay in its enumerated powers lane.
So, which way do they want it?