Environmental Groups Sue to Stop Restart of Offshore Production
Two environmental groups sued the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to prevent Sable Offshore Corp. from restarting oil production on three platforms off the coast of Santa Barbara. The tree platforms, along with an onshore processing facility, are part of the Santa Ynez Unit, which has been shut since the 2015 Refugio oil spill. Sable plans to restart production in the second quarter of 2025.
The Center for Biological Diversity and the Wishtoyo Foundation allege in their April 2, 2025 lawsuit that the government is violating the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act by failing to require Sable to revise the Santa Ynez Unit’s development and production plans.
The groups argue that the development and production plans are “woefully outdated,” as they were originally approved in the 1970s and 1980s and “have not been meaningfully revised since then.” The groups argue that the Santa Ynez Unit has “already exceeded the level of production contemplated in the DPPs and associated environmental analyses” and that the “old age and degraded state of the Santa Ynez Unit infrastructure compounds the risk of an oil spill.”
The Santa Ynez Unit consists of the three offshore platforms located in federal waters located five to nine miles offshore from Goleta in water depths of 900-1200 feet. It also includes an onshore oil processing plant located in Las Flores Canyon, near Goleta, and related pipeline infrastructure.
The unit was shut in 2015 after two pipelines ruptured and spilled 142,000 gallons of oil into the ocean near Refugio State Beach. The shut down of the pipeline required the three offshore platforms to also shut down, as the offshore oil could no longer be transported.
The Center for Biological Diversity and the Wishtoyo Foundation sued the federal government in 2024 after it renewed the 16 offshore oil and gas leases that service the platforms.