SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (CN) — Environmentalist groups were up in arms Friday after a unit of ExxonMobil disclosed earlier this week that it wants to repair and reuse an oil pipeline in Central California that ruptured and spilled 142,000 gallons of crude in 2015.
Pacific Pipeline Co. said in a letter to Santa Barbara County officials that it was pulling its application to build a replacement pipeline to transfer oil from its currently mothballed drilling platforms off the coast to refineries inland, and instead wanted to restart the existing pipeline.
“It’s great that the company admits investing in a new pipeline doesn’t make sense, but I’m concerned that it sees reviving a corroded pipeline with a proven record of spilling as a good alternative,” Brady Bradshaw, oceans campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity, said Friday. “The only thing that will reliably stop another spill is to decommission this old zombie pipeline and keep the offshore rigs shut down.”
Maggie Hall, deputy chief counsel of the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara, told local news station KSBY that at this stage of the climate crisis building new oil infrastructure was already reckless and that "restarting a corroded and compromised pipeline that already caused one massive oil spill is even worse."
Representatives of Exxon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the environmentalists' concerns.
In the Oct. 24 letter to county officials, the Exxon subsidiary said that since it acquired the pipeline from Plains Pipeline last year, the company has been evaluating both the possibility or replacing and restarting the pipeline.
"We find the potential environmental impacts associated with the major construction of a second pipeline unnecessary and avoidable," the company said in the letter. "Recent inspections and analysis affirms this initial view that it would not make sense to continue the permitting process when the existing pipeline can be responsibly restarted."
Exxon had to shut down its three offshore platforms in the Santa Barbara Channel in 2015, after a pipeline that carried the processed oil from an onshore facility to refineries inland ruptured and released 142,000 gallons of oil onto the beach and into the ocean.
The company in 2017 sought to modify the permit under which it operates its Santa Ynez facilities so that it can truck the crude oil from the processing facility to refineries for as long as seven years or until a new pipeline had been constructed. The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors denied the request in a 3-2 vote in 2022 because of the risk of oil spills from truck accidents, as happened as recently as 2020 on Route 166.
A federal judge last month rebuffed the company's effort to overturn the county's decision.
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