Sable Oil to Santa Barbara County: We Don’t Care

Drilling Secretly Begins Without Permits or Warnings

Why aren't more movies made about oil? It makes no sense given how much we need it for so many things. The best movie about oil made to date--the Two Jakes not withstanding--is "There Will be Blood," from which the line--delivered by Daniel Day Lewis (above)--"I drink your milkshake" comes. | Credit: IMDB

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STALKED BY LAZURUS: “I drink your milkshake.” It’s one of the great unsung movie lines of all time. Okay, maybe not up there with, “Round up all the usual suspects,” or “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” But for the County of Santa Barbara right now — standing in the crosshairs of yet another cataclysmic showdown with the oil industry — it’s perfect.

“I drink your milkshake” is the signature line to emerge from the movie There Will Be Blood, the unsettling 2007 masterpiece about the violent dawning of California’s black gold industry back around 1900. The line is delivered by the actor Daniel Day-Lewis — playing the personification of the new industry to predatory perfection — as he bashes in the brains of a preacher played by Paul Dano using a wooden bowling pin as his murder weapon. This happens just after delivering what has to be the most ominous tutorial on the technology of slant drilling ever filmed.

“I drink your milkshake.”

Last week, local enviros delivered an impressive “I drink your milkshake” throwdown showdown of their own when the county supervisors, acting as their proxy, voted 3-1 to pull the plug on any new and all existing onshore oil wells in the county. The oil industry — not aware it had even been placed on life support in the first place — was caught flat-footed, though it’s likely some strategically performative theater on their part is involved.

At the risk of seeming histrionic, the moment was historic.

Or so it seemed until early this Monday morning, when Sable Offshore stole the show by countering with an “I drink your milkshake” throwdown of its own.

First thing this Monday morning (May 19), Sable Offshore sent me an e-mail announcing — drumroll, please — that for the past four days, they’d already begun pumping 6,000 barrels of oil a day from wells on one of their offshore platforms and storing that crude in giant tanks located at the giant industrial oil plant, which they bought from Exxon two years ago, located on the mountain side of the freeway.

As wakeup calls go, that qualified as a six-alarm fire.

As far as anyone knew, Sable had not been issued any permits to begin such production. But then, Sable has come to regard a lot of necessary permits as strictly optional. Where other companies coyly play the “Better to beg for forgiveness later than ask for permission first” card, Sable displays a unique in-your-face indifference when it comes to both forgiveness and permission.

When dealing with regulatory agencies it deems impertinent, Sable’s posture has been one of naked defiance. “How are you going to stop us?” they all but ask, followed by the taunt, “You, and what army?”

So, the Coastal Commission fined Sable $18 million for twice blowing off cease-and-desist orders issued by the agency’s executive director for doing major earthmoving work without necessary permits in an area occupied by four endangered species.

Notably absent from the field of fray have been Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta, who have made it clear by their silence and inaction that Sable can do whatever it wants. Newsom is preparing to run for president and is picking and choosing his battles accordingly.

To date, Sable has succeeded beyond — I’m guessing — even its own wildest expectations.

But, as usual, I buried the lede.

Governor Gavin Newsom has been felt, but not seen or heard, in the ongoing saga pitting Sable Offshore against local enviros and some elected. With Donald Trump in the White House, Newsom has to pick his battles. Given that Sable is attempting to restart what had been an existing and permitted operation–not win approval for a brand new one–Newsom might be gun shy about joining the fray. That county energy planners have sided with Sable in its high octane dispute with the Coastal Commission over the need for additional permits and environmental review no doubt contributed to Newsom’s reluctance. And as Newsom positions himself to run for the White House, he is moving sharply away from some of more liberal positions. And besides, Newsome has never been a fan of the Coastal Commission. | Credit: Sunshine Design, Wikimedia Commons

The day Sable issued their early-morning fatwa just happened to be the 10th anniversary of the Refugio Canyon Oil spill, when 123,000 gallons of crude oil oozed out of a ruptured pipeline on the mountain side of the freeway by Gaviota State Park; slid under a culvert that the pipeline operators, then Plains All American Pipeline Company, didn’t even know was there — criminal negligence, anybody? — and slithered into the ocean for some petrochemical skinny-dipping.

An estimated 21,000 gallon oil spill just North of Refugio State Beach coating 4 miles of the shoreline and a sheen 50-100 yards wide (May 19, 2015) | Credit: Paul Wellman File Photo

To be fair, only about 50,000 gallons got into the ocean, but it would eventually spread about 150 miles down the coast. Birds would be befouled; dolphins’ blowholes would be clogged; dead animals would litter the beach as space invaders wearing hazmat suits attempted to clean the mess, while chasing off citizens who came to help.

Plains All American would later be found guilty of more than 60 counts of criminal negligence so egregious it almost qualified as premeditated stupidity. When all was said and done, Plains would spend about $870 million in fines, legal settlements, and cleanup costs. No one, naturally, would spend a day in jail. For that to have happened, they would have had to steal a microwavable can of Hormel chunky chili from the downtown 7-Eleven designed to look like a mosque.

But in the process, Plains All American managed to accomplish in one fell oops what 46 years of nonstop environmental agitation had failed to do: the complete and total shutdown of all offshore oil development of the Gaviota Coast.

No pipeline, no oil.

Exxon? Shut down.

Venoco? Shut down.

Freeport McMoRan? Shut down.

Translated, that’s roughly half the greenhouse gases emitted in Santa Barbara gone. Overnight.

Oil spills are not just some hypothetical possibility conjured by eco-minded bed wetters to give themselves something to get hot and bothered about; they actually do happen. A big one happened here by Refugio on May 19, 2015 because the pipeline company then in charge dropped the ball, not just once but many times. That company–Plains All American Pipeline Company–wound up spending $870 million to clean up the beaches, and to pay off fines, penalties and the inevitable civil litigation. Yes, Plains was a multi-billion dollar company and had a major insurance policy. But even Plains is still fighting over reimbursements with its insurance company, ten years later. Local enviros have expressed serious doubt that Plains’ successor–Sable Offshore–has deep enough pockets should the pipeline spring yet another leak. When the county supervisors deadlocked 2-to-2 whether to allow Sable to take over its predecessor’s permits,the depth of those pockets was one of the concerns troubling the two supervisors who voted no. Sable has sued the county to get those permits transferred. | Credit: Paul Wellman File Photo

And now Sable is about three microns from bringing Lazarus back from the dead by restarting what used to be Exxon’s massive plant along the coast.

In 2024, the United States experienced 27 weather-related disasters that inflicted more than $1 billion in damages. The year before that, it was 28. In 1980 and 1981 — the first years such stats were tracked — the combined number was five.

As climate scientists working for Exxon so precisely predicted in the late 1970s, greenhouse-gas-fueled climate eruptions wouldn’t start to explode until the early 2000s. To date, these industry forecasts have proven more accurate than any released by government agencies or academia.

But at the same time, Exxon bankrolled a massive propaganda campaign to deny, distract, and delay, spending millions to publish what the company knew to be outright lies as to the likely impact of climate change and the extent of scientific disagreement about it.

To stress what’s no doubt an irrelevantly cosmetic point: The timing of Sable’s press release was not remotely incidental.

May 19, 2015.

Among environmental activists, that’s a holy day of obligation.

Sable spokesperson Alice Walton — endowed with one of those wonderfully flat voices you’d never want to meet in a back alley — pooh-poohed any suggestion of passive-aggressive intent on Sable’s part, noting, irrelevantly, that production actually began four days prior. No state representatives had been notified four days earlier. No county representatives got a call. No one knew anything.

Nada. Nunca.

They waited until Monday for a reason. I have an advanced degree in thelinguistics of the middle finger. We all know what it means.

“I drink your milkshake.”

I love that line for another reason.

Imagine a straw 120 miles long with about 120 holes along the length of it. Imagine someone — like Sable — patching those holes. Now imagine trying to use that straw. How much of that milkshake is anyone going to be able to drink before it springs another leak? Or more?

That is the argument against Sable in a nutshell. Why not get a new straw?

Waves off Refugio Beach churn and move the oil spill along the coastline (May 19, 2015) | Credit: Paul Wellman File Photo

Back when Exxon still owned the operation, that was the plan. To be honest, it probably would have been fought every step of the way. But shortly before Sable entered the picture, the plan changed: Let’s use the existing pipeline.

The challenge was that the pipeline was badly corroded. To date, no corrosion control system has been designed or identified that can handle the idiosyncrasies of our geology, our weather, and the fact that our crude is so thick and gunky. To move that oil up steep mountainous hillsides, it has to be heated. All that heat breeds condensation. All that condensed water vapor accumulates at the bottom of the outer sleeves of the pipeline. Sooner or later, that breeds corrosion.

Yes, Sable will use the best technology. It will also test the line for corrosion. So too did All American. More often, in fact, than its permits required. Here’s the rub: The best available technology when it comes to testing is not good enough. We learned that the hard way in 2015.

The test results often underreported how bad the corrosion was. Seriously so. Where the pipe ruptured in 2015, the best available technology tests indicated the pipe was a little more than 40 percent corroded. But when they dug up the pipe, they discovered it was 87 percent corroded.

“I drink your milkshake.”

On May 19, 2015, the milkshake got into the ocean and killed a lot of birds and dolphins.

To be fair, the state fire marshal is insisting on more of the best available tests and more of what they call verification digs — 200 over 10 years, in fact. That’s where Sable will have to go dig a huge hole in the ground to determine just how corroded the pipeline really is as opposed to how corroded the best available technology says it is.

I hope everybody likes milkshakes.