EDCSource: Environmental Defense Center
Santa Barbara County’s Planning and Development Department has issued a staff report recommending that policymakers approve ExxonMobil’s proposal to transport oil by tanker trucks so it can restart three drilling platforms off the California coast. Opponents of the project vow to stop it, starting at Santa Barbara County Planning Commission hearings on the plan set for Sept. 29 and Oct. 1.
The report reverses the position staff took last year recommending against the use of hazardous Highway 166 as too dangerous. After that recommendation and the announcement by Phillips 66 that it will shut down its Santa Maria refinery and related pipelines — Exxon’s preferred destination for getting its offshore oil to market — by 2023, the company delayed the project. A revised final environmental impact report was released last month.
“The Santa Barbara County Planning Commission must reject the staff recommendation to allow ExxonMobil to truck crude oil along dangerous Route 166,” said Linda Krop, chief counsel of the Environmental Defense Center, which represents Get Oil Out! and Santa Barbara County Action Network in opposition to the plan. “Just last year, an oil tanker truck crashed on Route 166, spilling thousands of gallons of oil into the Cuyama River. More accidents and spills that threaten our public safety, water quality, and wildlife are unavoidable. We call on the County to follow the recommendation from last year, which was to prohibit any oil trucks on Route 166.”
The plan calls for up to 70 oil-filled trucks per day on coastal Highway 101 and hazardous Route 166, 24 hours a day, for up to seven years or whenever a new oil pipeline is completed, whichever is shorter. This timeframe can be extended by the county. ExxonMobil’s three offshore platforms near Santa Barbara were shut down in 2015 after the Plains All American Pipeline ruptured and spilled thousands of gallons of oil along the California coast.
“County staff are prioritizing Exxon’s profits over protecting Californians from deadly oil tanker truck accidents,” said Julie Teel Simmonds, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Why else would they suddenly drop their concerns about hazardous Highway 166 and its history of trucking accidents? Left to its own devices, Exxon won’t hesitate to usher in climate chaos, more offshore oil spills and explosive tanker truck crashes. If the county won’t step in and make the right decision, we’ll do everything we can to stop this terrible project.”
The revised final environment impact report now being considered by county officials concludes there would be significant, unavoidable impacts from the project, including significant impacts on wildlife, water and cultural resources in the event of an oil spill from a tanker truck. The document fails to analyze the numerous harmful impacts of bringing Exxon’s offshore platforms back online.
Offshore oil development also poses unacceptable risks of spills and air and water pollution. Oil spills along the Santa Barbara coastline threaten a wide range of federally protected endangered species, including blue whales, sea otters and California tiger salamanders.
“As Chumash people we continue to be concerned about the amount and methods of oil and gas extraction in our homelands and homewaters,” said Mariza Sullivan, tribal chair of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation. “The proposed trucking of oil, while simultaneously moving forward with an entire oil pipeline replacement project, is unthinkable. Not only will it wind its destructive path through our ancestral lands, it will add to the long history of the systematic erasure of the Chumash people. As a community we need to stop the continued destruction of what few natural places we have left.”
California suffers hundreds of oil-truck incidents a year, and many result in oil spills. There were 258 trucking accidents along the route from 2015 to 2021, California Highway Patrol data show, resulting in 10 deaths and 110 injuries. A tanker truck crashed off Highway 166 in March 2020, spilling more than 4,500 gallons of oil into the Cuyama River above Twitchell Reservoir.
Tanker trucks spill hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil per year, according to an American Petroleum Institute report. These oil spills can cause fires and explosions. An Associated Press study of six states where truck traffic has increased because of ramped up oil and gas drilling found that fatalities in traffic accidents have more than quadrupled since 2004 in some counties.
“Trucking oil is the least safe way to transport oil with the highest rate of spills and accidents, and restarting the aging offshore platforms puts our entire coastline at risk,” said Katie Davis, chair of the Sierra Club Los Padres Chapter. “The county must deny this project and let’s focus on the clean energy transition of the future — where we are making real progress, creating jobs with community choice energy and building out solar, wind and storage.”
A majority of Santa Barbara County voters say they oppose proposals to restart ExxonMobil’s offshore drilling platforms in the Santa Barbara Channel, according to a November 2019 poll. Nearly 3 out of 4 respondents said they were concerned “about the safety of our local highways if up to 70 oil tanker trucks are allowed on our roads each day.”
The company proposes to restart its platforms and load its offshore oil onto tanker trucks at its Las Flores Canyon processing facility. The trucks would transport up to 470,400 gallons of oil per day up to 140 miles to the Santa Maria Pump Station and then the Plains Pentland Terminal in Kern County. From those destinations the oil would be transported via pipelines to refineries in California and out of state.
ExxonMobil’s plans to restart its offshore platforms and onshore processing facility will also generate enormous levels of greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to climate change, undermining state and national climate targets and goals set by the county’s Energy and Climate Action Plan adopted in May 2015.
The coalition opposing ExxonMobil’s trucking plan includes Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation, 350 Santa Barbara, the Center for Biological Diversity, Climate First: Replacing Oil and Gas (CFROG), Environmental Defense Center, Food and Water Action, GOO!, SBCAN, Sierra Club’s Los Padres Chapter, UCSB Associated Students External Vice President for Statewide Affairs Esmeralda Quintero-Cubillan, UCSB Environmental Affairs Board (EAB), Surfrider Foundation Santa Barbara County Chapter, Los Padres ForestWatch, the Goleta Goodland Coalition, the Cuyama Valley Community Association and the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation.
The environmentalists got this one wrong- Pipelines (maintained pipelines) would have less environmental impact than these huge and heavy diesel trucks tearing up the roads and infrastructure with their weight, clogging up an already over burdened two lane highway 101 with very likely a possibility of a serious accident /spill /death /injury…
Is county staff finally making the connection between their own paychecks, and our local tax revenue producing economy?
They have my vote!
The Biden administration has asked OPEC to step up production. A thinking person would have to ask, “Why the heck would he do this….we have been energy independent for quite some time now and for years/years/year to come?” Well, Bob, that is wut weez call an “F-up”….. and now we have oil-filled trucks roaming our highways and byways for the foreseeable future. Drugs and oil are in demand…someone is going to provide.
Good lord your going to blame biden for the drilling in the ocean? Hes bar far been way more progressive than any other president. Just set a deadline for jet fuel to be discontinued. Solar power for more of our country…. Selective outrage is what im reading here. Im getting pretty tired of the blame the current president game for the faults of the previous.
Why is our progressive president asking OPEC to pump more oil when weez gets plenty?
I guess the Santa Barbara County’s Planning and Development Department does not believe the fires in California have been bad enough, the heat not bad enough, the drought not bad enough, they just want them to get a hell of allot worse and pour gas on the fire. Restarting three drilling platforms off the California coast is not going to help the area or California it’s going to make it much worse. It’s people like this which make climate change as bad as it is. Can we replace them?
Cut through the crap and the bottom line is that enviro people hate oil, period, and will advocate anything to strangle that industry. They have blocked reconstuction of a viable pipeline – clearly the safest option – maybe thinking that would stop production, but that strategy may be backfiring, so we may end up with the LEAST safe method of transport. Brilliant.
This is far from over, but practically it might make sense to reach some compromise between public safety and economic activity.
Sure, as long as big oil can make a profit, who cares if we kill ourselves?
12:37 : Bunk, yourself. You’ve swallowed their propaganda.
California does not have a tax on the production of oil. The only oil tax revenue the county gets is through property taxes. The information is publicly available at:
https://www.countyofsb.org/uploadedFiles/auditor/content/2020FinancialHighlights.pdf
It shows that Exxon is indeed, barely in the top 10, at number 10, with total tax payments of $125,173 in 2020. That’s 0.14% of tax revenue. In previous decades, oil companies have paid between $7 million and $8 million, which was about 3% of revenue back then.
Total cost of Refugio Oil Spill cleanup alone – $257 million. Cost in degradation of health and environment – subsidized by everyone, and beyond estimate. Yeah, that sounds like a good deal to me.
Fossil carbon as a fuel is a failed relic of the past. The jobs it supports here are low level and temporary, and newer technologies for renewable energy already provide better jobs. The amounts the fossil carbon industry reluctantly pay locally in taxes and partial mitigation of their destructive effects are a relative pittance that will soon evaporate. The faster we rid ourselves of these greedy parasites, in all countries, the better off the world will be.
All American Pipeline spent over a billion on their pipeline spill clean up, providing huge revenues for the local hotel industry for their multitudes of clean-up workers and toothbrush rock scrubbers. There clean-up spending more than made up in any lost tourism, that was due primarily to media overkill making it appear this small localized oil leak had just devastated the entire south coast including the City of Santa Barbara itself.
If we followed the science of modern tunnel boring and nuclear reactor technology we can transform the west into an electrified oasis of plentiful water and free from fossil fuel combustion.
Be sure to wear your snorkel! What a fabulist!
“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” (Winston Churchill). If oil companies managed their product safely, we wouldn’t need enviros to regulate it. And there have been plenty of local oil industry catastrophes costing taxpayers millions of dollars to clean up: Union Oil’s Platform A blowout in the Santa Barbara Channel (third biggest oil spill in our nation’s history after Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon), Plains All American Pipeline rupture at Refugio State Beach (poorly maintained, if at all), and business as usual any day of the week in Santa Maria’s Greka Oil Field. If authorities now permit oil trucks to leave every 20 minutes for 7 years on our jewel called the Gaviota Coast, they get what they deserve: infamy, notoriety, and personal liability for cleaning up the environmental mess which will inevitably happen again. Mark my words…..
Cannabis tax reported to be 35% under estimate for this last fiscal quarter. County will need to make up this lost projected revenue . Or reduce expenses.
Staff seems to work for the oil companies or anyone who comes forward with a project, even if it flies in the face of what we need to do to slow down climate change or if it brings lots of negative impacts to the residents of our county. Staff needs to work for the tax paying public, not the oil companies so they can continue to line their pockets. Look at the facts and recommend denial. Now the burden falls on the general public to take time from their work schedules and attend 12 hours of hearings. This project needs a firm denial by all planning commissioners.
We need oil/gas because we don’t have an infrastructure with out it yet, end of story. There is money to be made so, it will be made one way or the other. All this talk is putting a bandaid on a broken leg. Until all involved have another way to make this money, it’s going to be business as usual. So drive your electric cars (that take oil/gas to recharge) and think you got this but the reality is we don’t got this, not even close to any green options yet. Also, do some research of how horrible it is to make and dispose of all the batteries that we all think will save us…
You’re sadly misinformed on the progress and job producing capacity of clean energy. Obviously, you haven’t done the research you advocate, or done it in an inept manner by only looking at big carbon pronouncements.
Maybe the staff is tired of being overriden by the supes on their cannabis decisions, so are throwing the supes under the fossil fuel bus on this one?
VOR, Yeah, because people too stupid to get vaccinated are the ones I want to manage nuclear reactors and their waste that is toxic for 1000s of years.