Oil Drilling and Pumping Already Underway off Coast of Santa Barbara County, Sable Offshore Announces

[Updated: Tue., May 20, 2025, 9:45am]

Sable Offshore oil company marked the tenth anniversary of the May 19, 2015 Refugio Oil Spill — which famously has shut down all oil production off the Gaviota Coast — by announcing that just four days prior it had begun drilling and pumping 6,000 barrels of oil a day from offshore wells and storing it at the onshore facilities the Houston-based company had bought from ExxonMobil two years ago. 

For environmental activists — who observed the oil spill’s anniversary this past Sunday with a large-scale paddleout off the Refugio coast — the announcement was dispiriting, surprising, and upsetting. “You could say the timing was auspicious,” stated Linda Krop, chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Center and perhaps Sable’s most visible and vociferous antagonist in the company’s efforts to restart Exxon’s former facilities at Las Flores Canyon. 

Krop was caught flat footed by the news and expressed hope that the California Coastal Commission, the Regional Water Quality Control Board, or the State Parks Department might yet intervene and force Sable to undergo fresh environmental analysis and public process before any decision about whether allowing the plant to be restarted is made.

State Senator Monique Limón, chair of the Senate Public Resources Committee, expressed a sense of outrage, stating, “Ten years to the day that my community experienced a devastating oil spill from this very pipeline, Sable Offshore Corp has chosen yet again to make moves behind closed doors to restart oil production off the Gaviota Coast. They did this without notifying the community or local elected leaders who have expressed their concerns over this project and for good reason.” Limón noted that the spill of 2015 cost the local community $96 million in cleanup costs and $74 million in lost business.”  

While the news marks a major milestone for Sable, the company has yet to receive all the permits it needs for a full restart. According to the company’s press release — and statement to its investors — Sable predicted it would restart production and activate the much-repaired pipeline that sprang the leak that gave rise to the 2015 spill and begin selling oil again no later than July 2025. 

For the time being, the company is still conducting high-pressure tests on the much-corroded pipeline to ensure the repairs are adequate. That pipeline — the subject of intense technical and political scrutiny — has not yet been cleared for restart by the Office of the State Fire Marshal, which wields final say-so over its fate. A spokesperson for the Fire Marshal stressed that the work undertaken by Sable in the past few days is not subject to its jurisdictional purview and that the Fire Marshal has not yet signed off on any of the company’s restart plans. 

Right now, the company is pumping oil from Platform Harmony, located in federal waters off the coast, and storing it in Las Flores Canyon, where Sable says its storage capacity will be reached sometime in mid-June.  

As much as the announcement might have seemed timed to deliver a sharp elbow to Sable’s vocal environmental foes, it was more focused on assuring investors that the light at the end of the regulatory tunnel is fast approaching. (Sable stressed in its statement to investors that they should take “forward-looking” words like “expect,” “will,” and “forecast” with a cautionary grain of salt. “Actual results may differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements,” it noted.)  

When Exxon sold the Las Flores Canyon operations, it wrote into the deal definite deadlines for when production must be resumed. Already that deadline has been moved back once. In recent months, Sable has aroused the ire and wrath of regulatory agencies like the California Coastal Commission and the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Board, who charged the company did serious underground work without a permit or left deposits in nearby creeks. In fact, the Coastal Commission fined Sable $18 million for defying cease-work orders. Sable sued the state agency, insisting its work was covered by permits issued by the County of Santa Barbara in the late 1980s.