California officials have gone to federal court to halt and remove an oil pipeline that they say trespasses on state land near Santa Barbara, framing the dispute as an effort to limit federal wartime authority over state environmental and property rules.
At a hearing in Los Angeles scheduled for Monday, California officials asked a judge to order Sable Offshore Corp. to stop using the pipeline and remove it, according to the Associated Press report. The pipeline, which the report says snakes for about 4 miles (6 kilometers) through part of Gaviota State Park, is part of a broader restart of offshore production that the Trump administration directed after challenging state officials to allow the operation to resume.
The Trump administration’s position relies on a Cold War-era provision of the Defense Production Act, which Energy Secretary Christopher Wright invoked in March to direct Sable to restart drilling. The Energy Department, the report said, described domestic oil supply and national security needs during the Iran war as justification, including an assertion that California refines large shares of oil that travels through sensitive routes such as the Strait of Hormuz.
California officials dispute the federal authority and say state permission for the pipeline’s use on state land expired in 2016. Deborah Sivas, a Stanford Law School professor quoted in the report, said the pipeline is on state property and that the state should have a say, adding that federal action cannot simply override state land rules. The report also describes California’s case as part of a broader, escalating legal fight over how far states can push back against Washington during wartime, even as the administration rolls back regulations viewed as unfriendly to coastal oil drilling.
Sable had said it has the proper permits, while state officials argue Sable has been operating outside the law. The report describes prior state litigation that included a state judge ordering the operation stopped until Sable proved compliance with state regulations, and it says the Santa Barbara District Attorney filed felony criminal charges accusing Sable of polluting waterways and harming wildlife while it repaired the pipeline system after the 2015 rupture.
The pipeline system had been idle since one of its pipelines ruptured in 2015 and caused what California officials said was one of the state’s worst oil spills. The AP report said the spill blackened beaches for about 150 miles (240 kilometers) from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles and polluted biologically rich habitat for endangered whales and sea turtles, while killing scores of pelicans, seals and dolphins and hurting the fishing industry.
Energy Department officials told the AP report that Sable’s renewed output would boost California’s in-state production by 15% and replace almost 1.5 million barrels of foreign crude oil each month, but the report also includes criticism from researchers and California’s attorney general. Paasha Mahdavi, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in the report that the heavy, costly crude will not have an impact on domestic gas supplies or prices, and that the estimated production of 50,000 barrels a day is small on the global scale. Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, was quoted saying the claim that Sable would replace foreign oil supplies is fabricated.
Sable said the pipeline had already produced more than 1 million barrels of oil, with Jim Flores, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer, telling the AP report on April 20 that the company was working to provide American oil from American soil to consumers in California and the U.S. military. The Energy Department and Sable did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment on state officials’ assertions, the report said.
In court, the report said, Sable has told the judge that Wright’s order supersedes prior state actions, while the U.S. Department of Justice also asked the court to modify or end a binding federal court decree after the 2015 spill that gave the state the final say over the restart. The report says Sable is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in financial damage and is taking legal action to curb what it calls state and county regulatory overreach.
The federal case builds on ongoing state proceedings, the report says, including a Santa Barbara County Superior Court judge, Donna Geck, who kept in place an injunction she imposed last year after the California Coastal Commission fined Sable a record $18 million for ignoring cease-and-desist orders over allegations of working without proper permits. In her ruling, the report says Geck wrote that case law “strongly implies” that the Defense Production Act order alone did not permit violations of applicable state regulatory law. The judge’s latest decision requiring adherence to state and local regulations is now meeting a federal challenge over whether the wartime order can preempt those rules.
Security and environmental arguments have also appeared alongside other actions by the administration, the report said, including exemptions for oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act and other deep-water project approvals. For California officials, the immediate issue remains whether the restart can proceed through a pipeline that crosses Gaviota State Park without the state’s approval and whether the court should order removal while the legal fight continues.