Defunct for more than five years, an idle asphalt refinery is on track for revival thanks to a recent Santa Barbara County permit transfer.
On Aug. 12, the county Planning Commission greenlit a change of owner, operator, and guarantor on a permit to process crude oil into asphalt at a Santa Maria Valley-based 1930s-built refinery that closed in 2021.
Its previous owner, California Asphalt Production (aka Greka Refining Company) “essentially left the refinery idle” for three years before going bankrupt in 2024, county planner Jacquelynn Ybarra told commissioners at the hearing.
“The permit transfer does not include authorization to restart the facility,” she clarified. “That’s a separate process under the jurisdiction of Planning and Development, the county Fire Department, and the county Air Pollution Control District under existing permit conditions and other authorizations.”
Behind the permit transfer request, a company doing business as Santa Maria Road Materials acquired the refinery in 2025, “through a bankruptcy restructuring,” according to the staff report.
“My client is stepping in to save this damaged asset, investing already over $12 million to overhaul the facility,” local attorney Beth Collins, who represents Santa Maria Road Materials, told commissioners.
The company’s goal is to resurrect operations at the refinery sometime in September after undergoing separate additional reviews from county authorities, she added.
“What you have before you is, in my estimation, a no-brainer,” Collins said at the hearing. “You have a current owner/operator and guarantor on these county permits that has an abhorrent record, which resulted in the plant accruing several violations after significant deferred maintenance and neglect.
“If you don’t adopt the staff recommendation and approve this,” she continued, “you’re actually keeping that prior owner-operator-guarantor on the county permits.”
In 2018, the company formerly known as Greka Oil and Gas was ordered to pay the California Department of Conservation $12 million in fines for failing to comply with state oil and gas regulations. That same year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency served search warrants at the company’s Santa Maria asphalt refinery, shortly before issuing a stop work order.
The order outlined multiple red flags inspectors raised at the facility, including visible deterioration of infrastructure and the absence of certain tools—such as ground monitoring wells—on-site to detect potential hazardous waste releases.
“Now, you have a viable, well financed, capable, experienced owner who has already invested significantly, … to bring this facility back to life,” Collins told the Planning Commission.
Before the commission voted 5-0 to approve the permit transfer, Planning Commissioner John Parke described the applicant’s plan to reform the refinery as “incredibly important, … because of the unique role that the project plays in our local economy,” he explained.
“In this era of uncertainty we have about what’s going to happen to local oil production, for someone to do this and step in and create such a beneficial use for the county is really something special, and I appreciate it,” Parke said. “It’s a supply for that local asphalt we need. … And by we, I mean our road departments, our municipal agencies.
“It absorbs the local oil,” Parke continued. “That oil will be sequestered in roads instead of burned as gasoline. … Talk about a win-win.”
After describing asphalt as a carbon sink, local attorney Collins said that the crude oil her client plans to refine into asphalt will “be captured on our roads that even my Tesla needs to be able to drive on.”
This article appears in August 20 – August 27, 2026.
