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State oil regulators last month approved the first new drilling permits in Kern County since May 2023, renewing a vigorous debate over the Newsom administration’s approach to petroleum production.
Dallas-based oil producer Berry Corp. received permission from the California Geologic Energy Management Division on May 9 and 10 to drill at least 11 new wells in the Midway-Sunset Oil Field near Derby Acres. Prior to that, records show no new drilling had been approved in Kern oil fields since the four given to E&B Natural Resources on May 12, 2023.
The situation is fairly novel: Although Berry applied for the permits a little more than a year ago, they were approved under a 12-year-old environmental analysis covering several hundred acres and hundreds of wells. As such, the approvals do not necessarily suggest permits are coming up soon for more than 800 other drilling applications from Kern that CalGEM said are still under review.
Berry’s permits were the first issued under State Oil and Gas Supervisor Douglas “Doug” Ito, a former utilities regulator Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed last summer after CalGEM’s previous chief agreed to step down following a pressure campaign by environmental activists upset about a series of oil drilling approvals.
State data shows CalGEM has issued more than 2,700 oil field permits this year, 80% of them for plugging and abandoning old wells. About 18% of the total were for reworking wells, about one-third of 1% for deepening of existing wells and half that many for sidetracking of wells.
In a statement Tuesday, CalGEM noted drilling permits have been slowed largely because of a court fight that has halted Kern County’s permit streamlining system. People in the industry have said another impediment has been the agency’s learning curve on state-required environmental reviews, along with outside scrutiny of that work.
In Berry’s case, the window has long since closed for oil opponents to challenge its environmental analysis, a mitigated negative declaration that concluded the project won’t cause significant environmental harm or that measures were put in place to reduce its impact to less than significant levels.
While industry representatives expressed hope Tuesday Berry’s permits are the first of many more to come in the near term, environmental groups blasted CalGEM and Ito for allowing drilling they say endangers air and water quality to the detriment of neighbors and the planet.
“We had hoped, given the agency’s new Supervisor Doug Ito, that the agency would finally fulfill its mission to protect Californians and regulate this dying and toxic industry. It has not,” Coalition Director Kobi Naseck at Voices in Solidarity Against Oil in Neighborhoods said in a news release. “This new round of permits is a clear step backward and continues the state’s racist legacy of drilling in neighborhoods.”
The coalition that put out the release, called the Last Chance Alliance, said Berry’s permits “mark a change” to a trend that has seen a steep decline in permits. It noted there were thousands of new drilling permits early in Newsom’s tenure, then about 500 in 2022 and, last year, just 18 approvals for drilling new oil wells.
The group termed the environmental analysis on which Berry’s permits were based “an outdated document” that failed to properly vet the new wells’ “elevated risks.”
“The document’s conclusions, including that a 1,200-well project in the oil field would not result in significant environmental impacts, strain credibility,” the release stated.
Meanwhile, last month’s approvals gave hope to an industry that has grown impatient with CalGEM’s permitting reviews. It has argued for years that permitting delays only increase California’s reliance on imported oil produced in places like Saudi Arabia and Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest.
CEO Rock Zierman of the California Independent Petroleum Association trade group noted CalGEM has been working on its permitting system to make sure oil producers’ drilling applications comply with the California Environmental Quality Act.
“As they train more staff, we expect permitting to speed up, since they have a legal obligation to process permits,” Zierman said by email. “They can’t simply let them linger forever.”
Spokesman Kevin Slagle of the Western States Petroleum Association trade group said by email the Newsom administration is still to blame for the slow pace of drilling permitting in California.
“It’s good to see permits being issued after so long,” he wrote, “but 11 total is not nearly enough to meet the needs we have for energy production.”
For its part, CalGEM said through a spokesman oil drilling permits are only approved when the applications meet the state’s strict environmental standards.
“The Department of Conservation (CalGEM’s parent agency) reviews individual permits on a case-by-case basis and only approves if the permit meets standards set under state laws and regulations and required environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act is complete,” it said by email Tuesday.
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