By Guest commentary Friday, March 27th, 2026

By Jim Lisi

Oil is flowing again. On March 14, 2026, Sable Offshore Corp. began shipping crude through a pipeline that had been inactive for nearly eleven years — one that ruptured in May 2015, releasing roughly 101,000 gallons of crude oil near Refugio State Beach, with an estimated 21,000 gallons reaching the Pacific. 

That spill was a disaster, caused by a badly corroded section of Line 901, owned by Plains All American Pipeline. 

After the spill, federal regulators ordered Plains to install automatic shutoff valves, upgraded pressure sensors, and emergency shutdown systems. Plains never completed that work. It was a crime, and Plains was held accountable.

But this is no longer Plains All American’s pipeline. 

It sold the pipeline to ExxonMobil in 2022, which sold it to Sable in 2024. Sable inherited the aging infrastructure and the unfinished safety checklist, then spent two years inspecting, testing, and partially rebuilding the line. 

The question, stripped of politics, is this: does the refurbished pipeline pose a serious spill risk — and have regulators been evaluating that honestly, or using safety concerns to achieve a permanent shutdown of offshore platforms?

Start with the one recognized deficiency that delayed the restart. In October 2025, the California State Fire Marshal notified Sable that certain sections of the pipeline showed corrosion and were not measured correctly. 

The Fire Marshal’s position was clear: inspection tools have a margin of error, and that margin must be included in certification measurements. 

Sable disputed this, arguing that certain safety checks can only be run after oil is flowing and that post-restart inspection will determine what permanent repairs are needed — which is, in fact, how much of the modern pipeline industry manages risk. 

But it means the verification comes after, not before, the oil starts moving.

That dispute is not trivial. Older pipe, like the steel in Line 901, is particularly susceptible to the weld corrosion that caused the 2015 rupture — one that attacks at a faster rate than ordinary rust and grows in a way that makes sudden failure more likely. 

The defects are genuinely difficult to measure accurately. The Fire Marshal was not inventing problems. Whether their analysis is correct, or whether the bar rose every time Sable got close to clearing it, is the question — and the answer is contested.

What is harder to dismiss is the pattern surrounding actions of other regulatory bodies. Sable completed pressure testing of all pipeline segments by May 2025 — then received an $18 million fine from the California Coastal Commission, the largest in the Commission’s history, for conducting repairs without permits. 

It faces five felony charges and sixteen misdemeanors from the Santa Barbara County District Attorney for allegedly discharging pollutants into local waterways during that same period. 

California then passed SB 237, signed in September 2025, requiring any pipeline idle for five or more years to obtain an entirely new Coastal Development Permit — effective January 1, 2026, just weeks before Sable’s anticipated restart.

A law that resets the regulatory clock on a specific facility, timed to catch it mid-process, is not safety oversight. It is a punitive legislative sanction dressed up as environmental review.

The pipeline is now operating under an emergency federal waiver. Federal safety regulations require serious corrosion defects to be repaired within 180 days of discovery — an urgent deadline that is not optional. 

That requirement was waived under a presidential national energy emergency declaration. 

We all now rely on Sable to monitor the line, perform ongoing inspections, and repair any issues promptly — to manage risk instead of ignoring it like Plains did.

So, if the pipeline runs incident-free for three years, does that prove it is safe? In a meaningful sense, yes — it is solid evidence that the corrosion is confined and monitoring is working.

The harder questions are whether Sable has earned that benefit of the doubt, and whether California and its environmental allies have tilted the playing field in search of a kill shot on offshore drilling. 

Sable, with its felony charges, unpermitted work, and crushing loan deadlines, looks to the public like a bad actor. California politicians and environmentalists, with retroactive laws and shifting requirements, look like they are running a company out of business rather than managing a risk. 

The coast deserves honest answers about the actual risk. So far, neither side has provided them.

Jim Lisi is the owner of Santa Barbara Valuations and a representative of The Mentor Group’s investment banking and cost segregation services.