If you think Trump isn’t behind Sable and its two federal moves, using the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), and now the Federal Defense Production Act (DPA) in its attempt to resume shipping offshore oil through its damaged pipeline, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.
Trump and Sable Offshore would like us to believe that war with Iran has caused the kind of oil shortage “emergency” that allows the usurpation of state and local laws and regulations by the DPA. The DPA is used by presidents to compel private companies to prioritize and produce materials for national defense. It was most famously invoked by President Truman during the Korean War to seize steel mills and prevent striking steelworkers from disrupting wartime production.
While the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas is shipped, has caused an “emergency,” it is not an oil shortage emergency. It’s a price hike at the pump emergency, not close to the type of national defense justification required for the DPA.
Because oil is not being shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, prices at the pump have spiked more than 26% nationally and more than 20% in California since late February. The average price of a gallon of gas is now $5.40 in Santa Barbara County and $5.51 across California.
The reality, however, is that as of March 2026, the United States remains the world’s largest oil producer, pumping over 13 million barrels per day of oil, with output exceeding that of Saudi Arabia and Russia combined, while also remaining the world’s largest LNG exporter. The Wall Street Journal has reported that though the war with Iran has spurred real-time price increases, U.S. energy officials believe domestic fossil fuel output will mitigate extreme long-term scarcity.
The Trump approach is to label everything under the sun as ‘emergencies’. Whether it is drugs smuggled from Venezuela, the “worst of the worst” immigrants running wild in Minneapolis, an oil shortage on the first day of his second term, or going to war with Iran, ‘emergencies’ allow him to act unilaterally and outside the normal order. Sable has adopted this same playbook by arguing an oil shortage sans proof.
And even if Trump wants to call this an emergency, California law and the courts still stand in the way.
California recently passed Senate Bill 237, which imposes new safety and permitting requirements on idle pipelines, creating another significant layer of state-level “red tape” that the DPA would have to specifically override. Separately, Attorney General Rob Bonta has filed a federal challenge in the Ninth Circuit against the federal government’s assertion of exclusive jurisdiction over the pipeline restart.
On top of this, environmental groups including the Santa Barbara Environmental Defense Center (EDC) have filed two state-level cases that were later consolidated, specifically suing Sable. On Feb. 27, Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Donna Geck ruled against Sable by upholding an injunction that barred the company from resuming production until it could first demonstrate it had secured all the necessary permits from the many state agencies with regulatory oversight.
However, California’s strongest legal shield is the 2020 federal consent decree designating the Office of the State Fire Marshal (OSFM) as the authority empowered to clear the pipeline for restart. As of this writing, the State Fire Marshal has held that Sable “must repair all immediate and 180-day repair conditions prior to restart.” These include anomalies of 40% or greater pipeline wall loss. Moreover, in her ruling, Judge Geck stated that the matter would have to be resolved by a panel of federal judges later this summer, when the case is scheduled to be heard. In the meantime, she ruled, the Fire Marshal still has the last word.
What is at stake in this oil war between Sable and California is restarting what was ExxonMobil’s Santa Ynez Unit—three offshore platforms (Hondo, Harmony, Heritage), and onshore processing plant, and the Las Flores pipeline complex, formerly owned by Plains All American Pipeline. The Las Flores complex contains the line that ruptured in the 2015 Refugio oil spill.
While Sable paid $643 million for the assets, 97% was financed by an Exxon loan, which in this writer’s opinion, made Sable a stalking horse for the oil industry’s effort to restart production off Santa Barbara. What’s at stake financially if Sable is successful is hundreds of millions in free cash flow (FCF) in 2026, potentially growing to $1.5 billion annually by 2030, with a total estimated valuation as high as $10 billion.
That is the upside for Sable. The downside for Santa Barbara is much easier to picture.
On the other side of the equation is the threat of yet another Santa Barbara oil spill. The 2015 pipeline spill in contention dumped over 142,000 gallons of crude oil, 21,000 gallons of which reached the ocean, killing fish, invertebrates, and marine mammals. The spill also shut down the region’s commercial fisheries, closing beaches up and down the coast, and costing the beachfront industry millions of dollars in lost revenue.
The irony of this struggle occurring off the Santa Barbara coast, where in 1969 the nation suffered its worst marine oil spill to date, cannot be overstated. That spill not only ushered in the modern-day environmental movement, it also dumped more than 100,000 barrels (not gallons) of crude oil into the Santa Barbara Channel, fouling beaches from Goleta to Ventura, killing thousands of sea creatures, and economically devastating our coastal economy.
So, this is the fight we are engaged in. It’s essential that state and local officials, along with Santa Barbarians, support Congressman Salud Carbajal’s March 5 conclusion that “There is no legal justification for invoking the Defense Production Act” and that it is “yet another misguided and illegal action by this corrupt president to reward his contributors in the oil industry — and that no doubt will be shot down by the courts.”
