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Hearings this week could decide the future of offshore oil in California

August 9, 2026

By the end of this week, California could be on a path to losing its legal right to regulate oil drilling in the Pacific Outer Continental Shelf — the federal waters off the state’s coast — and see the first expansion of offshore drilling in decades, starting as soon as next year.

Or, conversely, events in coming days could fortify the state’s environment-first stance on ocean management, particularly if they lead to court decisions that reflect what some advocates argue is political overreach by the Trump administration.

Those wildly divergent outcomes are what experts on both sides of the offshore oil debate say could come out of two separate hearings, on Monday, Aug. 10, in Santa Monica, and on Thursday, Aug. 13, in Santa Cruz.

In Santa Monica, the subject will be whether California should continue to have a say over offshore drilling and other projects proposed in federal waters. In Santa Cruz, the question is about the use of fracking to boost offshore oil production. Both hearings involve federal officials and the California Coastal Commission, and neither is expected to produce a ruling that won’t be challenged, later, in court.

The back-to-back hearings, experts add, represent the biggest showdown yet in a long-running battle between pro-oil President Donald Trump and increasingly anti-oil California.

“(This) week is going to be a very big deal,” said Grant Bixby, a Newport Beach real estate broker and member of the Business Alliance for Protecting the Pacific Coast, an anti-offshore drilling group that includes more than 8,100 business owners from both major political parties, in California, Oregon and Washington.

“If the Trump administration gets its way on this, the state will be worse off,” Bixby added. “Business is not helped by offshore oil drilling. In fact, a clean ocean is actually one of the most profitable economic resources we have.

“But what’s happening might not be about good economics, at least not for everybody.”

Some high-ranking federal officials disagree.

Though agencies involved in this week’s hearings did not respond to requests for comment, the July 29 version of the Trump administration’s Five-Year Offshore Oil and Gas Leasing Program would let oil companies drill in three zones of federal water off the coast of California. The area in question includes roughly 125 million acres that run from the outer edge of state waters, which end three miles off land, to the outer edge of the continental shelf, which runs 80 to 100 miles away from the coast.

It’s unknown how much oil or natural gas might be trapped in the shelf, or if it would be profitable to extract. But with oil prices currently at or near record heights — and with the Trump-backed Iran war serving as a potential long-term factor driving prices up — the economics of drilling off California have rarely been brighter.

Earlier this year, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose department oversees the process for federal offshore drilling nationwide, suggested oil off the coast of California is vital for national security, and added that the state’s efforts to block its extraction amount to “environmental extremism.”

But people who don’t want new offshore drilling — including many who say politics aren’t a factor — suggest the idea of reviving an industry that repeatedly has fouled the ocean and sucked money away from non-oil businesses as diverse as housing and fishing, also is extreme.

“This is super alarming, and it is definitely not a Democrat versus Republican thing. This is about our businesses, which a lot of us have spent our lives building,” said Donna Kalez, owner and president of Dana Wharf Sport Fishing and Whale Watching, which runs 11 boats out of Dana Point Harbor.

“It’s also about a way of life,” Kalez added.

“The ocean is where we make our money, every day. And drilling in the ocean — so that somebody else can make money — is sort of stealing.”

Whose ocean is it?

Today, 23 of the 27 oil platforms off the coast of California are located in federal waters.

The newest of those was built in 1989, and many were approved or re-approved for operations by the California Coastal Commission. The 50-year old, voter-created agency — often criticized as overly bureaucratic and anti-business, yet widely supported by California residents — oversees development along or near the coast, typically with an eye toward keeping the ocean clean and the beaches accessible to the public.

The question at the heart of the meeting in Santa Monica is whether the Coastal Commission should continue to have any say over projects in federal waters.

California, like all states with a coastline, currently has a right to weigh in on development in federal waters because of a 1972 law called the Coastal Zone Management Act.

The law is intended to balance national and regional interests when it comes to ocean-connected development, and some of its rules are simple: States can say yes or no to proposals aimed for federal waters, or seek changes to those proposals, based on that state’s specific economic and cultural interests, as long as they also take into account any benefit a project might mean for the country. The feds can overrule a state only if they can show that a particular project is essential to national security, or if the project in question has benefits to the public that outweigh any potential risk.

At the hearing in Santa Monica, a federal agency that operates under Lutnick’s Commerce Department — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — will listen to members of the public, business leaders and others to see if California is still living up to its side of the Coastal Zone Management Act. (The in-person hearing is at the Hilton Santa Monica hotel, but sign-ups to attend ended Aug. 8.)

In recent years, the Coastal Commission has said ‘no,’ or at least sought changes, to a variety of proposals that were supported by Trump, including requests related to offshore drilling, more test flights by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and a multi-billion-dollar proposal in Huntington Beach that would have turned ocean water into tap water, among others. If federal officials say those responses reveal a Coastal Commission that’s gone rogue — and that the commission is no longer balancing federal needs with state needs — then the agency can rule that California is out of compliance with the Coastal Zone Management Act.

The Trump administration has been pretty open in its disdain for the state’s environmental policies, and for the Coastal Commission in particular. Because of that, and because of recent revelations that the Trump administration has withheld federal money from some states where voters don’t support Trump, at least some environmentalists believe the debate in Santa Monica is already over.

“This review, in Santa Monica, is just a way to justify decertifying the state’s Coastal Zone Management Plan,” said Brady Bradshaw, senior oceans campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity, a group that advocates for environmental causes.

“They’re going through the motions,” Bradshaw added. “I don’t think the Trump administration has any interest in listening to residents of California.”

Whether that is or isn’t true, the federal decision also isn’t a final say. The Coastal Commission is widely expected to take any adverse ruling to court, potentially arguing that the federal government can’t deny a state its fundamental rights — in this case, a say over projects that affect its economy — over politics.

But officials with the Coastal Commission, speaking on background, also suggest a scenario in which the timing of the hearing, not the final decision about the Coastal Commission’s compliance with the Coastal Zone Management Act, could be the factor that restarts oil drilling off the California coast.

They note that any ruling out of the Santa Monica hearing is likely to become public next spring. That’s exactly when the Trump administration wants to auction off the rights to drill for oil in federal waters off the California coast. At that point, unless a court rules in the state’s favor or reacts quickly to a request for a temporary restraining order, it’s possible that offshore drilling off California’s coast could start again without any state input. Undoing those leases later, officials add, could be tricky and expensive for the state.

That scenario, however, isn’t necessarily backed by economics.

Oil industry analysts — also speaking on background — said the gamble of buying leasing rights without knowing they would hold up in court might be too high, even for companies booking record profits.

Those same experts suggested that even with permanent approval, long-term oil drilling in the region also could be a high-stakes gamble.

The costs associated with learning how much oil and natural gas exists within the shelf (a process that environmentalists say would damage ocean life), along with the money they’d have to spend to sink wells, build platforms and extract oil — all at sites dozens of miles offshore, in a deep and often turbulent Pacific Ocean — will limit the market for those leases.

But even if oil companies could make big money off the coast, broader questions about economic benefit and harm would be huge.

Many experts argue that offshore oil extraction — which, even as a limited business in California, has generated environmentally and economically harmful spills in places as diverse as Huntington Beach, in 2021, and Refugio Beach, in 2015, as well as in dozens of smaller but also damaging events — isn’t great for non-oil businesses. They point to Louisiana, a state heavily reliant on offshore oil extraction (about 25% of the state’s GDP comes from it), but isn’t hugely connected to industries such as economic services and high tech, as an example of how something that helps the oil industry isn’t always a stand-in for “good for business.”

What’s more, experts say California’s ocean economy — without new oil extraction — is already booming. Recent state projections suggest the ocean helps generate about $51 billion of business a year in California, a number that doesn’t include ocean-oriented categories like home values and non-beach tourism.

“There’s no amount of oil that would make it economically beneficial, to everybody, to resume drilling off the California coast,” Bradshaw said.

“Now, would it be good for some companies? Maybe. But not for everyone.”

The push to frack

The question at the heart of the Aug. 13 hearing in Santa Cruz is less complicated.

A company that runs some of the state’s active offshore platforms, DCOR, is asking the Coastal Commission if it can use a form of fracking technology to nearly quadruple the production it’s getting out of Gilda, a platform that sits roughly 8.6 miles off the coast of Oxnard that gathers oil from 16 underwater wells.

Gilda generates about 1,100 barrels of oil a day, making it a comparatively tiny producer.

With fracking — which is already outlawed on offshore platforms in California waters, and is widely viewed as an environmentally degrading and often risky process — Gilda’s production would jump to about 4,000 barrels a day. That’s still small, but it would reverse a trend that, for now, shows Gilda on a pace to be decommissioned, possibly in the next few years.

For DCOR, fracking could stave off the expense of shutting down Gilda, a process that could include capping underwater wells and possibly tearing down an offshore platform.

Still, scientists working on the Coastal Commission’s staff recently recommended that the agency’s 12 commissioners vote against DCOR’s request. While acknowledging that fracking could help the company financially, they noted that DCOR has been connected to spills in recent years, and offshore fracking, particularly in California’s creaky network of offshore oil pipelines, poses an environmental and economic risk.

“DCOR’s facilities have been involved in two of the three most significant offshore spill incidents in the past five years, including a seafloor pipeline rupture and spill offshore of Huntington Beach in 2021 and a natural gas leak and fire at a platform offshore of Carpinteria in 2026,” the Coastal Commission staff said.

“Many of the measures proposed to be implemented as part of the project to protect against spills are the same as those in place on these other facilities. The proposed fracking operation would also place additional strain on DCOR’s aged infrastructure, both due to the high-pressure injection of fracking fluids and the four-fold increase in throughput of oil through its wells, platform and seafloor pipelines. This would not only increase the likelihood of a spill but add to its potential size and severity.”

But, in a process that might mirror what could happen after the Santa Monica hearing, the Santa Cruz hearing could wind up in court.

And if that happens, experts say there’s a long-shot chance that fracking becomes a tool that jump-starts oil production in California’s already approved offshore sites. Lots of wells off the coast of California are in decline, and fracking might reverse that trend — and stave off decommissioning costs.

“The fracking proposal is stand-alone, but it’s a serious threat,” said Bradshaw, of the Center for Biological Diversity.

“Approval, or a court ruling to let fracking happen (in federal waters), would set a really bad precedent. We know there are other companies interested in doing it.”

To date, the fracking hearing hasn’t drawn public comment from many state officials. But officials have started to weigh in on the Santa Monica showdown between the Trump administration and the Coastal Commission.

On Thursday, Aug. 6, the state filed a formal statement related to those hearings, opposing the Trump administration’s review of the Coastal Commission and urging state residents to express their views, too. (Online comments will be taken until Aug. 22, at czma.california-evaluation@noaa.gov.)

“We won’t stand by while Trump sidelines the people who rely on and care for California’s coast,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom in a prepared response. “Now is the time to make our voices heard. Give the Trump administration an earful.”

Other, less political actors are also watching.

“The fracking is a new thing for me, but we’re still fighting the offshore drilling, overall, and the new leases that might come out of the thing in Santa Monica,” said Dana Point fishing entrepreneur Kalez.

“A lot of people don’t even think this is going on,” she added. “But from a coastal business point of view, we’re all paying attention. It’s a big deal.”

Orange County Register

News Details

Hearings this week could decide the future of offshore oil in California

Whose ocean is it?

The push to frack

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