Plan to open California lands to drilling sparks backlash
Carly Nairn
SAN BENITO COUNTY, Calif. (CN) — On a clear afternoon in March, a group of California condors glided in the air high above Pinnacles National Park in Central California.
At just around 42 square miles, Pinnacles may be small for a national park, but it has a big personality. It’s full of ancient volcanic rock formations, as well as talus caves where Townsend’s big-eared bats roost. It’s also one of few places in California where these critically endangered condors are released as part of the state’s captive breeding program.
Now, though, this small park is in the middle of a big fight over public lands. In January, the Bureau of Land Management announced plans to open federal land next to Pinnacles for private oil and gas development.
It isn’t just Pinnacles. Under the plan, the bureau wants to open more than 725,000 acres on California’s Central Coast for extraction.
In Southern California, the agency wants to open 400,000 additional acres of public lands, as well as 1.2 million acres of federally managed underground resources. Many of these federal properties sit right next to existing state and national parks, including Pinnacles, Mount Diablo State Park, Sequoia National Park and Carrizo Plain National Monument.
The proposals have sparked backlash from a wide range of opponents, including ranchers, public health officials, recreationists and conservationists.
Top state officials have come out against it. In a comment letter opposing the proposals, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said new drilling would harm communities through increased air and water pollution and doesn’t align with California’s 2030 climate goals.
The idea of opening California lands to oil and gas extraction dates back to the first Trump administration, when President Donald Trump first proposed doing just that.
The nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity sued, leading to a 2019 settlement with the Bureau of Land Management. Under the settlement, the bureau had to revise its environmental analyses and impact statements to make sure they followed bedrock laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Federal Land Policy Management Act.
With Trump back in office for a second term, the bureau is once again pushing hard on these proposals.
The bureau’s new analyses, released in January, were met with disapproval and even fear.
The plan includes 47 million acres of “subsurface mineral estate” located within parks and other protected areas. It isn’t much different from the previous analysis that was already shot down in 2019, nor does it include viable alternatives as required by law, said Victoria Bogdan Tejeda, a senior attorney for the group.
“We want the Bureau of Land Management to take into account new information and changed circumstances,” Tejeda said in an interview. Among them: newly listed species in California and the growing impacts of climate change.
Tejeda is far from alone in her opposition. At a virtual public comment session in January, not a single person spoke in favor.
In opposition was a broad coalition of critics, including climate activists, academics, working and retired doctors, campers, ranchers and residents. Together, they voiced concerns about a litany of harms that they said could happen if oil derricks were allowed near parks and neighborhoods.
Among those opponents was Kathy Kerridge, a board member with the nonprofit Benicia Community Air Monitoring Program. She cited the health impacts of new oil and gas production as her main concern.
“[It’s] absolutely ridiculous that we are considering more drilling,” she said at the public comment session.
Federal officials and likely supporters are more tight-lipped. The California Independent Petroleum Association and the Western States Petroleum Association did not respond to requests for comment. The National Park Service declined to comment.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of the Interior, the parent agency of BLM, stressed in an email that any sold land would “carry stipulations designed to protect important natural resources.” They said that “even when leases exist, BLM‑managed lands remain open for multiple uses, including recreation.”
As for the overwhelmingly negative public comments, the spokesperson said they would be “reviewed, addressed, and incorporated into the final decision to ensure meaningful public involvement in federal actions.”
On a recent morning, conservationist Juan Pablo Galván Martínez looked out over Mount Diablo State Park from a park entrance near the town of Clayton.
“Here it is,” he said, gesturing over the landscape. “The heart of the matter, pretty much.”
About 130 miles north of Pinnacles in Contra Costa County, Mount Diablo State Park features some of the most striking landscapes of the 200-mile Diablo Range, which stretches from the Bay Area to Kern County. Creatures like black-tailed deer, bobcats, coyotes and mountain lions wander the mountains here among oaks and wildflowers.
“It’s like the biodiversity hotspot of biodiversity hotspots,” said Martínez, a senior land use manager with the nonprofit Save Mount Diablo. “You have dozens of rare species. You have endemic species found nowhere else on Earth.”
“It’s because of topography, temperature [and] water availability,” he explained. “It hasn’t faced nearly the amount of development pressure as the rest of California, especially along the coast and the flatlands.”
Now, like Pinnacles, Mount Diablo is among the California landmarks that advocates fear will be jeopardized with new oil and gas development. The BLM wants to open up land next to the park for energy exploration.
It’s unclear what companies would even find here. Although Mount Diablo was once mined for coal and mercury — and although mineral tests have shown trace amounts of copper and gold — there’s no sign this area has significant oil and gas deposits, Martínez said.
“They’re just trying to do a maximalist approach, regardless of if it’s going to work out, because they can,” Martínez said. “It’s a gung-ho, scattershot approach, and it’s more for people fighting the good fight to deal with.”
Rather than being based in science, Martínez thinks Mount Diablo is being singled out by the Trump administration to distract from other newsworthy events and to cause misery for a recurring foe: liberal California.
“Let’s play to our base,” Martínez said, “Let’s poke, in this case, the Golden Bear.” He said land proposals like the one near Mount Diablo are being undertaken “without regard to economic feasibility, without regard to sense [and] without regard even to the availability of resources.”
“Will there be oil derricks on Eagle Peak?” he asked about one of Diablo’s mountains. “I find it highly unlikely. But just the fact that this is being proposed right now means — it signifies — the total disregard these people have” for the natural beauty and actual needs of California.
Facing steep opposition and legal hurdles, it’s unclear how the BLM’s latest proposals will play out.
In the landmark 1987 case California Coastal Commission v. Granite Rock Co., the Supreme Court ruled federal law does not prevent the state from enforcing environmental rules like permit requirements. But since the federal government has rarely before taken such an adversarial approach to California, it’s unclear how exactly those legal disputes would go.
“There’s a long history of the BLM and California co-managing land for oil and gas in the state,” said Tejeda, the Center for Biological Diversity attorney. “It’s just under this recent Trump administration that they are trying to eviscerate that.”
While the bureau’s analysis may not have changed much since 2019, California has.
In 2022, the state created mandatory buffer zones separating oil and gas sites from schools and housing. In 2024, it banned new fracking permits, citing health and environmental concerns. Also in 2024, state lawmakers passed legislation allowing local governments to restrict new oil wells while phasing out older ones. All of those could present legal hurdles for the BLM.
The bureau is slated to issue a final decision on its Central Coast plan this summer.
Despite the challenges, the agency could very well prevail this time in court, said Deborah Sivas, director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Stanford University.
When agencies are forced to redo environmental assessments, “courts are a little bit more loath to say, ‘It’s not enough,’ because they’ve done a bunch more, usually in direct response to the inadequacies that the court found in the first case,” she explained.
Even so, conflicting state laws remain a big point of contention in the saga.
“The question in my mind is: The fracking ban, the buffer zone, all that stuff, does that apply?” Sivas said. “Is there a state regulation that could layer on top of the federal lands? And I don’t know the answer to that question because there hasn’t been a lot of litigation around this.”
Another major question concerns the economics of any new projects.
Sivas has litigated environmental cases in the state for decades, including helping Indigenous tribes protect the Sáttítla Highlands from geothermal development. From her perspective, the BLM proposals just aren’t economically viable.
“It’s really hard to get oil out of the ground in this area,” Sivas said of California’s Central Coast. “We’ve depleted the easy stuff, like at the San Arto oil field in Monterey.”
“It’s very heavy, dirty oil,” she added. “All these folks, they have to do enhanced recovery usually. And that means pumping steam, sometimes hot water, down to make it flow better.” In other words: fracking, which is explicitly banned in California. “And then when you think about it in these urban places, it just doesn’t seem feasible that some oil companies are going to step up and say, ‘Yeah, we want a bunch of leases here.’”
For that reason, Sivas predicts that large corporations like ExxonMobil and Chevron aren’t likely to bid on a lease. Instead, she says bids will likely come from smaller companies, which may not realize “just how hard it is and expensive it is to get oil out of the ground in California.”
As humans fight over the future of California public lands, some of the biggest impacts will likely be felt by other animals.
Mount Diablo State Park is essential habitat for many species of flora and fauna, Martínez said. Especially as climate change becomes more severe, he said safeguarding the Diablo Range means “keeping a whole bunch of little pockets of climate refugia protected.”
Meanwhile, Pinnacles National Park is important for the California condor. The carrion-eating bird has already faced many challenges over the years, from habitat loss to the now-banned DDT, which thinned the bird’s eggshells.
With the area around Pinnacles now in the crosshairs for possible energy development, bird lovers worry what that will mean for this critically endangered bird.
“Of course [this] raises concerns for species like the California condor,” Tejeda said. “There have been documented instances of condors being harmed by oil and gas activities.”
The troubling news comes as the condor seems to be rebounding.
In early March, as advocates like Martínez and Tejeda were drafting their response letters to the Bureau of Land Management, a condor mother in California laid a pale blue egg high up in a redwood in Humboldt County. The parents began tending to it.
Scientists believe it’s the first time a natural nesting has happened in more than a century, as condors have been bred in captivity for decades after a long species decline. And while these condors are nesting in Northern California, it’s unclear that other state natural areas like Pinnacles would remain a refuge for these vulnerable birds if the Trump administration’s plans go through.
The parents, two 7-year-olds, are named “She carries our prayers” and “At last I fly” in the Yurok language. A hatchling is expected in early April.