It looks like more crude oil won’t be passing through Santa Barbara County on highways after all, at least not for now.
Officials from the Energy Division of the county’s Planning and Development Department made the decision in a letter dated June 9. It follows a recent emergency request by ExxonMobil to transport crude oil by tanker truck.
The letter was addressed to Nathan Eady, a vice president/project manager for SCS Tracer Environmental, which is the Santa Maria company that filed the request on behalf of ExxonMobil.
The county said it denied the request for several reasons. For one, the county didn’t find enough evidence that an actual emergency existed. In addition to that, the county said the request didn’t require any more urgency than the normal request process.
Also, the trucking plan didn’t conform to land use ordinances.
But the letter also states that the company can still apply for a permit using the traditional permitting process, which requires a formal environmental review.
“The applicant has the option of applying for this proposal through the customary permit process, which would include CEQA review, policy and ordinance consistency analysis, and a public hearing,” Planning and Development Department Assistant Director Dianne Black wrote.
County officials didn’t return phone calls from the Sun asking for clarification on the letter.
ExxonMobil’s request was to truck crude oil from the company’s Las Flores Canyon facility, where oil is received and shipped via pipeline to local refineries, including the Santa Maria refinery in Nipomo.
The pipeline connects to Line 901 owned by Plains All American Pipeline, which shut it down on May 19 after it discharged more than 100,000 gallons of crude oil onto Refugio State Beach.
Because Line 901 is shut down, ExxonMobil said in the application that trucking is needed or its production will be “curtailed” when storage capacity is exhausted, which the company said will occur in the next several weeks.
There’s also money on the line. ExxonMobil tried to justify the permit by adding that many local schools, including Allan Hancock College, would lose some funding from property taxes if production ceased.
“If production ceases, the property tax payments would be reduced, resulting in a loss of funding to these local schools,” ExxonMobil wrote in their application.
Company officials haven’t said what they’ll do in response to the decision.
“We are still studying the situation and the range of options, but we have made no determination what our next steps might be,” ExxonMobil Senior Media Relations Advisor Richard Keil told the Sun.
This article appears in Jun 18-25, 2015.