Sable Offshore Announces First Sale of Oil, Restart of Second Platform in Santa Barbara Channel

Sable Offshore CEO James Flores can be excused for crowing. Few people — let alone the skeptical choir of Wall Street investors — ever expected Flores and his combative, take-no-prisoners approach to regulatory oversight agencies would ever have made it this far. But thanks to a massive last-minute intervention by President Donald Trump, Sable Offshore defied the doubters and began production from Platform Harmony, one of the company’s three offshore platforms, at a clip of 22,000 barrels a day.

That was two weeks ago. Already, Flores is issuing press releases announcing Sable would begin tapping a second offshore platform — Heritage — at a rate of 30,000 barrels a day, starting Sunday, March 29. And he’s not stopping there. Sometime in the second quarter of this year, Flores — known for the hyper-optimism of some of his projections — also stated Sable will begin tapping the third platform, Hondo, at a rate of 10,000 barrels a day. 

With oil now fetching $119 a barrel on the global market due to the war on Iran, Sable has ample incentive to make hay while the sun shines. In the world of oil, 62,000 barrels a day qualifies as a lot of hay even if it’s still not enough to put a dent in the price of gas, now more than $5 a gallon in California and more than $4 a gallon nationwide, the highest in three years. 

In a company press release, Flores hit more than enough America First notes to acknowledge Trump’s pivotal role in his current success without mentioning the president ever by name.

“We are providing American oil from American soil through an American pipeline to an American refinery for American consumers and the United States military,” Flores stated.

Last week, Sable cinched a deal to have its oil refined at Chevron’s El Segundo refinery. In a press release on Sunday, Sable announced that oil sales from its Santa Ynez Unit had officially begun. Even the professional doubters monitoring Sable stock have softened their skepticism. 

“Sentiment has shifted from ‘extreme skepticism’ to ‘cautious optimism,’” wrote a writer who goes by the cryptic byline “Fintera” for the online investor zine Financial Content. 

In that same article, Fintera described Sable as “patient zero for a massive jurisdictional conflict” between the Trump White House and the State of California, whose Attorney General Rob Bonta just sued both Sable and the federal government. Bonta charged that Trump broke the law by how he invoked the Defense Production Act to order Sable to resume production at an oil facility shut down since the oil pipeline rupture of 2015 that spilled 142,000 gallons of crude oil along the Gaviota Coast and into the ocean. 

Even so, Flores and Sable are not out of the woods. Aside from the two lawsuits filed by the Attorney General, this Wednesday, Sable was scheduled to be arraigned in Santa Barbara Superior Court on 21 criminal charges for violating state and federal environmental law. Five of those are felony charges. All have to do with unpermitted repair work Sable did in fall 2024 to corroded pipelines that crossed four creeks that feed into the ocean — Asphaltum, Nojoqui, Arroyo Quemado, and Cañada de la Gallina creeks. The complaint filed against Sable last fall asserts the company crews diverted, obstructed, or otherwise impeded the flow of these creeks and knowingly discharging dredged material excavated materials into their channels, again without securing — let alone applying for —the necessary permits.

As of this writing, it’s uncertain whether the arraignment will proceed as scheduled and the extent — if any — Trump’s invocation of the Defense Production Act to greenlight Sable might derail the indictment completely. Calls and emails to the District Attorney’s Office were not returned on Tuesday, which was a holiday. Nor were emails to Sable’s public relations firm. 

Coming up soon, April 17, is a court hearing in Santa Barbara Superior Court Judge Donna Geck’s chambers whether the injunction barring Sable from restarting production should be lifted.

After that comes a major showdown in federal court over whether the State Fire Marshal or the federal pipeline safety agency — the Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) — had the last word over whether Sable should be allowed to restart. Under a federal court decree arrived at in 2020, the Fire Marshal was given the first and last word over restart. When the Fire Marshal informed Sable it hadn’t repaired the corroded pipe to the safety specifications the Fire Marshal had demanded, Sable accused the Fire Marshal of changing the rules late in the game and asked PHMSA to take jurisdictional authority away from the Fire Marshal. PHMSA complied and issued Sable an emergency permit to restart the pipeline right before Christmas. 

Stay tuned.