Clear as Oil: Judge Cuts Baby in Half in Sable Offshore Case

[Updated: Thu., July 24, 2025, 8:30am]

When Judge Donna Geck got through ruling on the latest showdown between Sable Offshore Oil and Santa Barbara’s environmental establishment last Friday morning, it wasn’t clear if the no-nonsense judge cut the proverbial baby in half or kicked the can down the proverbial road. If the latter, it’s not entirely clear how far. If the former, it would seem, Sable Offshore walked away with the bigger half. Either way, both sides are claiming victory. And either way, this was just one courtroom skirmish between the two sides among many others. None, it should be stressed, are even remotely resolved.

On the table was a motion filed by attorneys with the Environmental Defense Center (EDC) and Center for Biological Diversity to get Geck to slap an injunction against the California State Fire Marshal to stop his office from taking any of the actions necessary to permit Sable to restart the massive oil and gas facility it bought from ExxonMobil on Valentine’s Day last year. The oil operation has been shut down since 2015 when the pipeline ruptured, causing the major Refugio Oil Spill. Before such deliberations could start, they argued, the Fire Marshal needed to conduct public hearings on the safety of the company’s newly rehabilitated pipelines — so corroded that around 150 major repairs had to be made along their 120-mile stretch — and environmental review.

It should be noted that this June, Geck issued a temporary restraining order to freeze the Fire Marshal from processing any aspect of Sable’s restart application. That action was intentionally temporary, allowing Geck more time to better acquaint herself with the complex facts of the case and the various arguments put forward by the key combatants: Sable Offshore, the State Fire Marshal, and the environmental advocates.

Having done just this, Geck rejected the enviros’ petition for a formal restraining order. In her ruling, she suggested they were jumping the gun in seeking a permanent injunction. Their case would be ripe, she opined, if and when Sable secured all the necessary permits and approvals the oil company needed to trigger the Fire Marshal’s restart approval process.

Under the terms of Geck’s latest court ruling, the Fire Marshal’s office will be liberated to begin pursuing the preliminary steps and verifications necessary to issuing a restart order. The actual restart, however, cannot be issued until 10 days after Sable attests it has received all the necessary permits and approvals from all the requisite government agencies with government review. Sable has not responded the requests for information what those agencies are. 

As of this writing, it’s not entirely clear which of those agencies have yet to issue Sable the permits it needs to start the restart process and when they’re likely to do so, if at all. Even less clear is whether there’s any agreement among the dueling parties as to which agencies have standing to even weigh in. How, for example, is the State Fire Marshal — empowered with the last word over the oil company’s restart application — or even Judge Geck to factor in the county supervisors’ 2-2 deadlock on whether to approve the transfer of title and necessary permits from ExxonMobil to Sable? Sable and Exxon have sued the county over that vote; though the two sides have been engaged in mediation talks, no resolution has been announced.

Or does that dispute even need to be resolved before the Fire Marshal can process Sable’s restart application? And what if the California Coastal Commission were to decree Sable first needed to obtain a Coastal Development Permit to restart the old Exxon plant, shut down 10 years now by the pipeline rupture and ensuing oil spill of May 2015? While the commission has taken no such action, it’s hardly out of the question. Only a few months ago, it slammed Sable with an $18 million fine — the largest ever in commission history — for performing the much-needed pipeline repair work without such a permit and for defying the commission’s multiple orders to secure such permits first. The two sides are currently suing each other in Judge Thomas Anderle’s courtroom over that fight.

After Geck’s ruling, Sable issued a victorious sounding press release, announcing that the judge “ruled that Sable may restart the Las Flores Pipeline System 10 days after filing notice of Sable’s receipt of all necessary approvals and permits for re-start notice.”

On the flip side, attorney Linda Krop with the Environmental Defense Center summed up the ruling, stating, “We’re relieved. The ruling gives us further opportunity to further make our case before the Fire Marshal can start processing the restart application.”

If and when Sable will get all the permits needed to trigger restart deliberations remains a matter of significant conjecture. But after that — whenever that is — the judge gave Krop and the enviros 10 days in which to file new legal challenges. After that, restart proceedings can commence.

Krop’s case is simple, perhaps the only aspect of this dispute that is. It focuses not so much on the issue of restart as it does on the waivers the Fire Marshal granted Sable last December, allowing it to substitute an alternative pipeline safety and integrity plan for the “cathodic protection” corrosion control plan first approved when the pipeline itself was approved in 1985. What became immediately apparent in the 2015 pipeline spill — in which 142,000 gallons of oil escaped from the pipeline, much making it into the ocean — was the extent to which that cathodic protection system utterly failed to keep the pipes from corroding.

The Fire Marshal granted Sable a waiver in December, meaning that the company was allowed to pursue another way. That way, according to the Fire Marshal, relies heavily on a much more aggressive and frequent program of testing the pipes and adopting lower corrosion thresholds for when the company would dig up the pipe and visually inspect it.

Krop and the enviros have objected that the technology used to test for pipeline corrosion is notoriously unreliable. When used in the past, such inspections yielded numerous falsely optimistic readings. To the extent Sable were to dig up the pipeline for visual inspection, she argued, creek beds, streams, and the habitat for five federally endangered species could and would be disrupted in ways never envisioned by the pipelines’ original environmental impact report from the 1980s.

To comply with state and federal pipeline safety law and the California Environmental Quality Act, Krop argued the Fire Marshal needed to have done an Environmental Impact Review (EIR) on the waiver, held a public hearing, and provided a written explanation of the reasons justifying any conclusions he came to. None of that, she objected, was done. Sable and the Fire Marshal have disputed Krop’s interpretation of pipeline safety law and have insisted that environmental analysis is not needed just to resume the use of what is a pre-existing development.

Judge Geck opined that Krop was not likely to prevail in court with her arguments about the need for environmental review and a public hearing; Krop would be better off focusing her objections at the restart decision, the judge concluded, and not the waiver. But alternately, Geck ruled that Krop would likely prevail in court with her argument that the Fire Marshal erred in not providing a written explanation for his decision on the waiver.

The can is kicked; the baby is cut; the matter is far from resolved. The next hearing takes place September 19, when Geck hears arguments from Sable and the Fire Marshall that the environmental objections should be summarily dismissed.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to correct the date of the next hearing and to clarify that under the terms of Geck’s latest court ruling, the Fire Marshal’s office will be liberated to begin pursuing the preliminary steps and verifications necessary to issuing a restart order. The actual restart, however, cannot be issued until 10 days after Sable attests it has received all the necessary permits and approvals from all the requisite government agencies with government review.