Sable Offshore Lands in Hot Water with Regional Water Board over Pipeline Repair Work

State Board Votes 5-0 to Refer Matter to California AG for Judicial Prosecution; Texas Oil Company Poised to Take County of Santa Barbara to Court

Sable's Steve Rusch with attorney D.J. Moore at last week's Coastal Commission hearing | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

Sable Offshore Corporation has gotten so seriously sideways with the state’s Regional Water Quality Control Board — the Central Coast regional branch — over the protracted game of cat-and-mouse the water boardmembers contend Sable has been playing over unpermitted repair work on the company’s oil pipeline that the water board voted unanimously to refer the matter to Attorney General Rob Bonta for judicial prosecution. Bonta, the board was told, enjoys more expansive legal authority to order a stop to the unpermitted work on the pipeline — which traverses three rivers and multiple creeks and streams and caused 2015’s Refugio Oil Spill — and can also impose stiffer fines than the administrative fine remedies readily available to the regional board.

The vote came this Thursday at a meeting held in Watsonville. While the meeting’s theatrics paled in comparison to the melodrama that unfolded last week when the California Coastal Commission came to Santa Barbara and smacked Sable with an $18 million fine, one water boardmember, Dr. Jean-Pierre Wolff, twice spoke glowingly about the prospect of dispatching state law enforcement officers to handcuff Sable backhoe operators to their heavy machinery. Without such a dramatic remedy, Wolff suggested, the game of cat-and-mouse can go on indefinitely.

Water boardmember Dr. Jean-Pierre Wolff spoke glowingly about the prospect of dispatching state law enforcement officers to handcuff Sable backhoe operators to their heavy machinery. | Credit: Regional Water Quality Control Board

Sable dispatched attorney Michael Mills to make their case. “We seek an expedited resolution of the many outstanding issues with the board,” Mills said, adding that Sable’s commitment to working things out would abide whether the board voted to bring the Attorney General into the mix on their behalf or not. The board vote was 5-0.

The water board has permit authority over all streams, rivers — whether ephemeral or not — and any waters that belong to the State of California or the United States. Sable is in a red-hot hurry to get the heavily corroded pipeline it bought from Exxon last February repaired and rehabilitated. If the company is not up and operating by the first quarter of 2026, Exxon is reportedly contractually entitled to repossess the totality of what’s known as the Santa Ynez Unit, which encompasses not just the pipeline, but three offshore oil platforms, and the massive oil and gas plant located near Refugio. Getting the pipeline repaired in a timely manner appears to be the company’s primary obstacle in getting the old Exxon plant restarted.

Sable came to the water board’s attention last February when it first received a complaint that Sable’s extensive work — digging trenches 10 feet deep along 120 pipeline repair sites — was triggering unpermitted waste discharge into rivers, creeks, streams, and waterways belonging to the state or the nation. By law, Sable would be required to seek permits for any such discharges in advance. With Sable, the water board only found out only after the fact. Water board staff notified Sable that any discharge into any ephemeral streams and creeks required advance notice and permits; Sable reportedly stated it had examined all work locations and found no project impacts to waters of the state.

Later, in November, water board inspectors would find and document evidence that Sable had performed work and discharged waste into state streams. Sable had not filed a report of waste discharge, nor had it sought the required permits. The state board would then order Sable to provide an inventory of all land-use activity and discharges to waters of the state and United States. In the water board’s bill of particulars against Sable, it charged that the documents Sable provided failed to provide critical information specifying the locations where such disturbances took place.

“While Sable has submitted after-the-fact applications to perform restoration at some of the sites,” the state board report stated, “it [Sable] continued to perform work and discharge waste at new locations without filing required reports … despite having received notice of the requirement.”

In fact, water boardmembers were told by their staff that Sable’s work had continued unabated up through this week.

Many of the environmental advocates now bird-dogging Sable’s efforts to restart Exxon’s old facility up the coast showed up for the water board meeting either in person or via Zoom. While urging the boardmembers to seek out the Attorney General’s bigger legal guns, they also got their rhetorical licks in, describing the three offshore oil platforms as being at the end of their projected life spans and the 122 miles of pipeline as being afflicted with “runaway corrosion.” A representative from State Assemblymember Gregg Hart showed up, reading a letter from Hart strongly encouraging the water board to refer the matter to Attorney General Bonta. With Bonta’s office in their corner, the water boardmembers were told, the Attorney General could get a court-ordered injunction to stop Sable’s work, if need be.

That scenario did not play out as projected, however, earlier in the same day, when Judge Thomas Anderle rejected a motion for a temporary restraining order by attorneys working for Bonta’s office to stop Sable from doing any more work on pipeline repair without first obtaining permits from the California Coastal Commission. In the meeting one week ago, the Coastal Commission had issued Sable its third cease-and-desist order as well as imposing the $18 million fine.

In a tentative draft of his legal opinion, Anderle initially indicated support for the restraining order. But in response to a late-night filing by Sable attorneys — which Anderle read in the open courtroom while teams of attorneys for all sides waited and watched — Anderle changed his mind.

Sable attorneys had mocked the notion that the environment was in any imminent danger or peril from the company work crews, noting that Bonta’s office had waited on the sidelines as Sable work crews hammered away at their long list of repairs for six months. How imminent a threat could it be, they asked, if it took Bonta six months to jump in?

More fundamentally, however, they argued that the County of Santa Barbara had issued a statement on February 12, stating that Sable’s repair work was permitted under the terms of the first pipeline permits the county issued to Sable’s predecessors in 1985. That jurisdictional question is a much stickier wicket legally, and one that will require significant heavy lifting by any judge who hopes to unravel it.

Judge Anderle set the trial date concernying just that for May 14, but by that point much of the work Sable has yet to do will have been done.

Jeremy Frankel, one of the two attorneys for the Environmental Defense Center seeking to stop Sable, noted that considerable work still needs to be done on the pipeline that runs through four miles of Gaviota State Park. The State Parks Department has notified Sable that its pipeline easement has expired long ago and has made noises that a more stringent level of environmental review might be necessary before granting Sable the necessary easements. Whether State Parks is bluffing or serious about this has yet to be seen.

In the meantime, the County of Santa Barbara just issued Sable a notice of violation and $2,000 fine for working long into the night — well past its 7 p.m. curfew — on the pipeline that runs along Santa Rosa Road in the Santa Ynez Valley. That work reportedly has involved multiple generators — loud and noisy — needed to push water through the pipelines at exceptionally high pressure. This is known as hydrostatic testing and is a necessary test to determine whether the pipeline — seriously corroded at 120 different locations — is structurally sound enough to withstand the operating pressures of a pipeline carrying crude oil up and down hill.

Multiple neighbors complained to the county over the late-night noise and lights. They complained to the work crews as well; the workers there were reportedly polite. But only recently have the late-night hours abated and noise buffers — bales of hay — been installed. Sable offered to put the residents up in an expensive hotel, but for them — with farms to operate and children to raise — that was not an option.

Lastly, Sable has put the County of Santa Barbara on notice that it’s poised to take legal action against the county over the supervisors’ 2-2 tie vote in February on whether to transfer to Sable the permits and title to the land held by Exxon. Under the parliamentary law governing supervisors’ meetings, a 2-2 vote qualifies as no action, meaning the transfer did not take place. Sable has argued that in the case of such a tie among the supervisors, the planning commission’s 3-1 vote in favor of the transfer should prevail. The county has thus far insisted that the supervisors’ vote is what’s known in the parlance as a de novo vote, meaning that it is in no way tied or connected to the Planning Commission vote.

Editor’s Note: The correct name of the Sable attorney who attended Thursday’s water board meeting is Michael Mills, and D.J. Moore, not Mills, is the Sable attorney pictured at the Coastal Commission meeting.