On March 23, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Energy for ordering a restart of oil operations at the Santa Ynez Unit.
“In a breathtaking power grab,” Bonta stated, “the federal executive branch has asserted that [it] may preempt and supersede all state laws governing hazardous pipelines … in an effort to extract as much petroleum as it can from the coastal waters off of California.”
Oil flow at the Santa Ynez Unit halted in 2015 when one of its pipelines burst and spilled more than 120,000 gallons of crude oil at Refugio State Beach. Plains All American Pipeline owned the unit at the time.
While the unit’s current owner, Sable Offshore Corp., has faced pushback from multiple state and Santa Barbara County agencies over past work done to reboot the pipeline system, a federal decree on March 13 mandated that oil flow resume as a matter of national security.
U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright described the directive as responding to “supply disruption risks caused by California policies that have left the region and U.S. military forces dependent on foreign oil.”
One day after the decree, Sable began transporting Santa Ynez Unit oil through the Las Flores pipeline to Pentland Station in Kern County.
In his complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, state Attorney General Bonta described Sable as unhappy with California’s various permitting protocols to green-light a restart “not because they were taking longer than other similarly complex and environmentally sensitive reviews, but because the pipeline operator was severely undercapitalized and desperate to begin generating revenue.”
Bonta also called the Department of Energy’s justification regarding national security as “patently unreasoned.”
“Although international conflict has driven up oil prices globally by reducing oil exports from the Middle East, there is no actual shortage of crude oil in the United States,” Bonta stated.
He added that the Santa Ynez Unit’s expected gross oil rate of 50,000 barrels per day amounts to a fraction of a percent in the domestic energy market.
“Even if there were any marginal benefit to the ‘national defense,’ it would be vastly outweighed by the environmental and safety risks, as well as the unlawful and unconstitutional displacement of the state’s police powers and the intrusion upon the state’s sovereign property rights,” Bonta stated. “This court should declare that [Secretary Wright’s] order is unlawful.”
Following the Santa Ynez Unit’s revival, Sable Offshore Corp. announced in mid-March it expects to commence oil sales produced at the facility by April 1.
This article appears in March 26 – April 2, 2026.