by Edward Ring
California bans offshore oil while importing dirtier foreign crude, worsening environmental and energy outcomes at home
In December 2023, an obscure federal agency known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management produced a “Field Reserve Estimate Summary” in which they claimed that up to 10 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil lay just off the West Coast of the United States. The vast majority of that oil is off the coast of Southern California.
This isn’t news to Californians, where billions of barrels of oil have already been extracted from offshore rigs. But the state legislature and local elected officials are determined to shut the industry down, on shore and offshore. Last month in Santa Barbara County, the Board of Supervisors voted to ban any new drilling and phase out all existing oil operations.
Oil companies still operating in California have become accustomed to dealing with a bureaucracy that’s hostile to their very existence, and the Santa Barbara ruling was particularly devastating to Sable Offshore Corp., a Texas-based company taking on the quixotic task of convincing California’s regulators that tapping some of that 10 billion barrels of oil—in particular the rich reserves in the Santa Barbara Channel—is something they should be allowed to do. But in the face of bans, lawsuits, and threats from state and local politicians, bureaucrats, and third-party litigators, they’ve decided to try another approach. It might work.
Sable’s oil platforms are located five to nine miles offshore in federal waters, and if the State of California won’t permit them to pump the oil through a submerged pipeline to storage and distribution facilities on shore, they’ll pump directly onto ocean-going tankers, completely bypassing the state. They’ve got a friend in the Trump administration, which plans to lease new acreage in federal waters off the California coast for new offshore drilling.
How those leases proceed will depend largely on whether Sable’s gamble is successful. Direct transfer of crude oil from offshore rigs to tankers is not far-fetched. It is a common practice worldwide, including in the North Sea, the Persian Gulf, off the shores of West Africa, and in the Gulf of Mexico. If it can be done successfully in the tumultuous North Sea, it can undoubtedly be done off California’s Pacific Coast.
What ought to be inexplicable, at least in a logical world, is how California’s entire ruling political machine is united to stop oil drilling off its coast but supports development of up to 20 gigawatts of floating offshore wind turbines. The scale of this proposal is mind-boggling. To generate 20 gigawatts would require 2,000 wind turbines rated at 10 megawatts—only when the wind blows, of course—and these are incredibly large machines. A 10-megawatt wind turbine typically stands nearly 700 feet from the waterline to the tip of a blade in vertical position. They require huge pontoons and counterweights, as well as tethering cables hooked to the sea floor nearly a mile underwater. Each turbine also requires an undersea high-voltage cable to connect it to the land, which is planned to be 20 miles offshore.
How can the California Energy Commission, with full encouragement from a supermajority of elected politicians, possibly think that a floating wind farm this big would not be a bigger environmental problem than a few oil rigs? And it’s not just environmental impact that ought to reveal the insanity of this preference. The energy that can be harvested from wind is a pittance compared to the potential from this oil reserve.
Even if a 20-gigawatt wind farm were ever completed, and even if the wind were strong enough to deliver a 40 percent (intermittent) yield from these turbines, over a 20-year service life, these turbines would produce—to use a unit of energy favored by scientists and economists—a total of five exajoules. Five. Compare that to ten billion barrels of crude oil, which contains 61 exajoules of total energy, twelve times as much. Even if only a small fraction of that oil were extracted, it would easily exceed the best possible lifetime production from these wind turbines. And instead of being massively subsidized by taxpayers in order to deliver expensive electricity, this oil would create jobs and generate tax revenue.
It’s not as if California doesn’t still need this oil. California still relies on oil for nearly 50 percent of its total energy use, along with natural gas providing another 30 percent of its energy. California’s transportation sector relies on gasoline and diesel fuel for 94 percent of all fuel used. Yet California imports more than 75 percent of its oil despite the state’s ample reserves. Instead of sourcing more oil in-state to create jobs and to do so under strict protections for the environment, Californians import most of their oil from the Amazon and the Persian Gulf, locations with appalling environmental stewardship and almost nonexistent protections for labor.
Perhaps the greatest irony of all is the fact that oil extraction in California actually helps the environment, and not merely because every in-state drilling rig is one less to be transported into the depths of the Amazon on roads blasted through the rainforest in order to fill bunker fuel-guzzling oil tankers en route to the pristine shores of America’s eco-state. There are benefits within the state as well.
Contrary to the press releases and crippling directives issued by California’s biased state agencies staffed with fanatics, most leakage of methane and other pollutants is not caused by the oil industry and will not be solved by shutting down active wells and by spending billions to recap abandoned wells. Oil seepage and methane leaks in California occur naturally because California’s underground oil reserves are continually brought to the surface through seismic activity. A recent study conducted at UC Berkeley found that methane leaks from oil production and distribution are negligible, outweighed by orders of magnitude from natural leakage along the state’s ubiquitous earthquake faults.
The only way to effectively stop seeps of oil and methane on land and offshore in California is to deplete the fields through oil drilling and extraction.
That common-sense, counterintuitive but absolutely accurate conclusion would require a degree of enlightenment that California’s policymakers are unlikely to ever muster. Meanwhile, California’s dependence on petroleum products is not going anywhere.
Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also the
director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center,
which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is
the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021)
and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/11/26/californias-war-on-oil-harms-the-environment/
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