Exxon Takes Tanker Feud to U.S. Court

Saying county officials have no control over federal waters, Exxon Corp. is seeking a court order to stop Santa Barbara County from meddling in the oil giant’s decision to ship local crude oil by tanker along the Ventura County coast to refineries in Los Angeles.

The Houston-based oil company today is set to ask the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to intervene before Santa Barbara County officials tighten requirements on Exxon, forcing it to use pipelines for oil that passes through its treatment facility north of Goleta.

County planning officials contend that Exxon is circumventing its agreement with the county to use pipelines--which are environmentally safer than tankers--to transport the 100,000 barrels of oil it pumps daily from three offshore platforms in the Santa Barbara Channel.

Exxon uses pipelines to carry the crude to shore and another series of pipelines to ship it to the San Francisco Bay area. But the company had been reshipping a portion of that oil back down the coast to Los Angeles by ocean-going tankers until March, when a federal agency temporarily ordered the company to stop.

The order from the Minerals Management Service was lifted in July, and Exxon plans to resume its use of tankers to supply oil-hungry refineries in Los Angeles.

“The county thinks it has the jurisdiction over oil being shipped from San Francisco,” said Exxon spokesman Bruce Tackett. But the tankers, he said, will run 50 miles off the coastline, in federal waters outside of Santa Barbara’s jurisdiction.

Officials in Santa Barbara, which suffered a 4.2-million-gallon spill from an oil platform blowout in 1969, vow to hold Exxon to county rules that require the company to use pipelines for most oil shipments so as to protect the coastline and Channel Islands National Park from environmental catastrophe.

“Even if their tankers are 50 miles offshore, there is a substantial risk that a spill could affect the coastline and the islands,” said Bill Douros, deputy director of Santa Barbara County’s Planning Department. “The Exxon Valdez spill traveled 250 miles.”

In the Exxon Valdez disaster, the worst oil spill in U.S. history, the tanker ran aground off Alaska’s coast and spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil.

County officials failed to get the California Coastal Commission to block the tanker shipments in September, after the Minerals Management Service ruled that the additional three tankers a month would bring “a minimal incremental environmental risk to the California coast.”

So now, the county’s Planning Commission is reviewing its permit on Exxon’s onshore processing facility to try to force Exxon to comply with the county’s pipeline requirements. A public hearing is scheduled for Thursday morning.

Attorneys for Exxon will ask a U.S. District Court judge this afternoon to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the Planning Commission from holding the hearing.

“The purpose of this hearing is to pressure Exxon into ‘voluntarily’ relinquishing its constitutional rights,” the lawsuit states. County officials have repeatedly refused Exxon’s requests to call off the hearing, the suit said, and by pursuing the matter is hurting the company’s reputation.

“Exxon has and will continue to suffer harm to its reputation as a result of Santa Barbara’s unlawful position that Exxon’s tankering is in violation of the local permit,” the lawsuit said. The suit asks the county to pay the company an unspecified amount of damages and to pay its attorney fees.

County attorneys filed a response in court Tuesday, arguing that the county has not made any decisions on Exxon’s case and therefore any court order is premature.

Planning officials have invited Exxon to testify at the hearing and raise its arguments that the county has no jurisdiction in this matter, Douros said. If the Planning Commission decides to tighten Exxon’s restrictions, the company could appeal the matter to the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors. If unhappy with the supervisors’ decision, then would be the proper point for Exxon to take the matter to court, he said.

“This is Exxon’s usual bullying tactics,” Linda Krop, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Center, said of the oil company’s lawsuit. The Santa Barbara-based center has nudged county officials to keep up the pressure on oil companies to use environmentally safer pipelines whenever possible.

Krop predicted that the lawsuit would backfire on Exxon, raising the ire of local officials. “The county supervisors have had it with Exxon,” she said. “Exxon has promised to use pipelines and now it is reneging on that promise.”