Shock Reports: Sable to Seek Trump Blessing for Oil Barges in Federal Waters, in New Scheme to Dodge State Safety Laws

Nick Welsh scoops: Entangled in web of regulatory and legal curbs in its bid to restart obsolete SB pipeline, Texas company eyes return to the past with risky ocean transport of offshore oil.

Sable Offshore - facing stiff opposition to its plan to reopen an outdated pipeline that caused the disastrous 2015 Refugio spill - now threatens to enlist the Trump regime in a bid to evade state and local laws and regulations that have blocked its plan, the Santa Barbara Independent reported on Monday night.

Unless it quickly receives the go-ahead from California officials in the pipeline matter, the sketchy Texas oil company will seek a quick okay from the Administration to restart long-prohibited tanker transport of oil in federal waters offshore of Santa Barbara, according to the newspaper’s story.

Nick Welsh reports:

Sable Offshore Oil Company announced on Monday, September 29, it would seek federal permission to install an offshore storage and treatment (OS&T) facility located in federal waters, three miles off the California coast. The oil will be pumped from its three offshore platforms also in federal waters. This will put the company safely beyond the authority of state or local regulatory agencies, something which has frustrated Sable since it bought the Santa Ynez unit oil facilities from Exxon two years ago.

The company announced if it is not permitted to restart its onshore pipeline soon, it will implement the OS&T option, a significant shift from its current plans that rely on a working pipeline…

Sable stated that it was pursuing the OS&T option because of its frustration over regulatory delays at the state and county level. “Continued delays related to the Onshore Pipeline will prompt Sable to fully pivot back to a leased OS&T strategy which was utilized to process SYU (Santa Ynez Unit) production in federal waters from 1981 to 1994. Over this time, the SYU produced [more than] 160 million barrels of oil equivalent.”

Nick notes that previous owners of the offshore platform and drilling rights operated an OS&T facility for many years off the Santa Barbara coastline, site of multiple catastrophic oil spills that repeatedly galvanized the environmental movement, until they were stopped by political and legal pressure mounted by local advocates and political leaders over a decade ago.

Read his complete report here.

View from the right. Jon Fleischman, California’s leading right-wing opinion columnist, posted a report on Monday about the issue, a pro-oil cheerleading polemic that rested on unnamed “reliable sources” and presented the prototype Sable argument.

Never mentioning the 2015 Refugio disaster, Fleischman’s piece in his “So, Does It Matter” newsletter, is riddled with ad hominem attacks on local environmentalists, but provides a useful model for understanding what the Santa Barbara community faces in standing up to the raw power of the oil industry and its allies in the Trump government.

California’s standoff with Sable didn’t just happen. It was engineered.

Local activists and NGOs like the Environmental Defense Center, a Santa Barbara-based environmental law group, and the Sierra Club, one of the nation’s oldest environmental organizations, have opposed every restart plan. State agencies piled on. At a Santa Barbara hearing earlier this year, no fewer than a dozen bureaucracies testified. Even actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus showed up, throwing down on behalf of left-wing Hollywood.

But there’s more. The legislature passed, and the Governor just signed, a bill set to take effect in January that kills any onshore restart. And you can predict that state actors will stall out an approval until the new year, just to kill it. Oh yeah, Santa Barbara County District Attorney John Savrnoch went so far as to file criminal charges against Sable, which is nutty.

This is not policymaking — it’s trench warfare.

You can read Fleischman’s piece here.

Gregg weighs in. Santa Barbara Assemblyman Gregg Hart, in response to Newsmakers, late Monday denounced Sable, saying the company’s latest move “underscores its ongoing contempt for state law” and vowed legal action.

“This rogue Texas oil company has no place operating in California,” Hart said. “Its newest scheme, to barge oil to undisclosed ports at unknown costs, is a reckless and desperate maneuver that will be vigorously challenged in court.”

“I am confident that state and federal courts will recognize this half-baked plan for what it is - an environmental disaster in the making - and will return Sable to the California Coastal Commission, where it must seek the permit required under California law,” the state legislator added.

We’ll have more on this week’s episode of Newsmakers TV. Stay tuned.

P.S. We discussed the possibility of this scenario emerging, on last week’s edition of Newsmakers TV.

Image: Oil on the beach at Refugio State Park, on May 19, 2015, the first day of the disastrous spill (U.S. Coast Guard photo).