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In 2019, Kern County ranked first among California’s oil-producing counties and seventh overall in the nation with 76 active oil fields producing 119 million barrels of oil and 129 billion cubic feet of gas, according to a lawsuit the county Board of Supervisors filed in 2021 against Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“We’re importing from countries like Ecuador, where they’re clearcutting rainforests … to drill for oil, instead of letting us do it here in our own backyard where it’s produced safely [and] where we get the benefit from it,” Peters said.
He believes the state and environmentalists have adopted a “not-in-my-backyard” mentality toward the oil industry and would rather outsource drilling, extraction, and refining to foreign countries that are known polluters.
Statistics provided by the California Department of Conservation to The Epoch Times show that new drilling permits in the state increased from 1,788 in 2018 to 2,676 in 2019, then decreased to 1,994 in 2020. Since then, new permits plummeted from 564 in 2021 and 551 in 2022, to 25 in 2023 and 86 in 2024.
Skip York, chief energy strategist at energy consultant Turner Mason & Co., told The Epoch Times that new drilling permits in Kern County have “gone from thousands down to dozens.”
The reduction in permits is “strangling the upstream part of the industry,“ he said, adding that it will ”put more pressure on ports and terminals because gasoline demand isn’t going down as fast as crude oil production is going down.
“So that means you need to import more crude oil.”
California’s Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM) is the entity that approves drilling permits.
Current rules state that if CalGEM does not reply within 10 days, a permit is automatically approved. The catch is CalGEM will send an email acknowledging receipt of an application but then doesn’t respond for years, according to State Sen. Shannon Grove, who represents the Bakersfield area.
That one catch—the initial reply from CalGEM, she alleges, has allowed the agency to stop thousands of permits from being issued.
“They say it’s a budget issue but it’s not,” she told The Epoch Times
CalGEM is funded solely by the oil industry on a per barrel basis, meaning that oil companies “have to write a check” to the state for drilling permits, “so it doesn’t cost the state” anything, she said.
Jacob Roper, a spokesman for the Department of Conservation which oversees CalGEM, said in response to the allegations that the state hasn’t “dismissed” the permitting issue.
“That’s a complete mischaracterization,” Roper said in an April 25 email to The Epoch Times.
He said the review and approval of permits are subject to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
“Kern County was the lead agency for CEQA reviews of oil and gas drilling permits for California’s largest oil fields, but several court decisions in recent years suspended the County’s practice,” Roper said. “Those decisions moved the entire workload to the state, and the Department of Conservation is making its permitting process dependable, efficient, predictable, safe and legally durable.”
Catherine Reheis-Boyd, CEO of Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA), told The Epoch Times that while discussions continue about the need for reliable energy sources and strategic petroleum reserves, in Kern County, “it’s all in the ground, sitting there.”
Environmental Laws
In 2020, a California court ruled against the county and the California Independent Petroleum Association, stating that the county had violated state environmental law by issuing oil drilling permits too easily. And last year, a state appellate court ruled the county had failed to meet California Environmental Quality Act requirements, putting a hold on permits for new well drilling.
“The court saw right through the county’s deceptive tactics on oil industry pollution and prevented an end run around the state’s fundamental public protections,” said Hollin Kretzmann, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, according to a 2024 statement.
“Kern County is hell-bent on squeezing every last drop of oil out of the ground, no matter the consequences. It’s vital that every permit gets a rigorous review to protect public health and our environment from this dirty and dangerous industry.”
York said the Trump administration might be able to clear the “huge backlog” of permit applications at the federal level for onshore and offshore drilling permits that built up during the Biden administration “but that’s not where the bulk of the production growth is going to be.”
The oil-and-gas industry is largely state-regulated and most of the production doesn’t happen on federal lands, so state policy often drives what can and can’t be done, he said.
Imported or Domestic?
California’s oil fields and refineries are the “cleanest, most non-polluting” anywhere in the world, but environmental activists and state agencies are hurting the industry and consumers, state Assemblyman Stan Ellis, a Republican representing the Bakersfield area, told The Epoch Times.
“Someday, we’re going to run out of oil. It might be 80 years, it might be 150 years,” Ellis said. “We need to look at future energy now—alternative energy,” he said. “I’m all about wind and solar, I like nuclear, I like fusion, I like nitrogen. I’ve been in science my whole life, and there is a pragmatic segue into other energies. But, it’s not right now.”
California simply doesn’t have the electrical power grid or infrastructure to facilitate a world without gas-powered cars, Ellis said.
The state generated about 5 percent of U.S. electrical power in 2023. Renewable energy sources, including hydropower and solar, accounted for about 54 percent of California’s total in-state electricity generation in 2023, while natural gas-fired power plants generated 39 percent, and nuclear power produced 7 percent, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA.)
“It comes down to a political agenda and it has hurt our state,” he said.
Mike Umbro, founder and CEO of Californians for Energy and Science, a nonprofit advocating for energy economics and environment and a developer of an oil field project west of Bakersfield, also told The Epoch Times that state policies are harming the environment globally, while at home, Californians are left to pay the highest gasoline prices and utility rates in the country.
Air monitoring equipment shows in real time there are no emissions from the oil fields at Poso Creek, Umbro said.
The post California’s New Oil Drilling Permits Drop From Thousands to Dozens per Year appeared first on Energy News Beat.
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