The Kern County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on June 26, 2025 to approve the third revision of the county’s oil and gas rezoning ordinance. A 2024 court decision required the county to approve the environmental review supporting the ordinance. The revision is the latest step in a legal battle over the ordinance that began in 2015.
The ordinance establishes production requirements for oil development on 2.3 million acres in unincorporated areas of the county. The revised ordinance could allow for the permitting of up to 2,700 new wells a year over the next 10 years, 23ABC Bakersfield reported.
The updated ordinance addresses the court’s concerns about the use of agricultural easements, health risk assessments, and the impact of water use from drilling on disadvantaged communities. The court must still approve the environmental review, and environmental groups could file a legal challenge against the ordinance within 30 days of June 26.
Kern County has been trying to assert local control over oil and gas permitting since 2015. In November 2025, in response to a slowdown in permitting at the Department of Conservation’s Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM), Kern County adopted an oil-permitting ordinance to approve up to 72,000 new wells in the county over 25 years without environmental review or public notice. Permitting in the county under the ordinance lasted until early 2020, when the Fifth District Court of Appeals ruled in a case brought by environmental groups that the ordinance violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
In March 2021, Kern County approved a revised ordinance and a single environmental review for more than 40,000 new oil and gas projects. The ordinance eliminated future environmental reviews and public comments. Permitting resumed in 2021 and 2022 until community and environmental groups sued the county again.
In June 2022, the Kern County Superior Court ruled that the environmental review of the 2021 ordinance violated CEQA by failing to address serious environmental harms. In January 2023, the Fifth Appellate District took the case and ordered the county to suspend oil and gas permitting while the court considers allegations that the permit approvals violated CEQA. The Fifth Appellate District issued a ruling in March 2024 that required the county to rework the 2021 ordinance. The court prohibited the issuing of local oil drilling permits until a new ordinance is approved.
The local Kern County permitting process is considered vital to increasing oil production in California. Kern County is the second leading oil producing county in the United States at 134 million barrels of oil and 111 billion CF of gas annually, according to 2016 DOGGR data. The county produces more than 72% of total oil production and more than 70% of total natural gas production in California.