A California judge on Friday upheld her temporary hold on a Texas oil company working to restart a network of pipelines to carry oil onto land from offshore rigs.
What happened: Santa Barbara Superior Court Judge Donna Geck denied Sable Offshore Corp.’s motion to lift a preliminary injunction she issued last year that limits the company’s ability to restart the Las Flores Pipeline system.
Why it matters: As part of her ruling, Geck said that Sable still needed to get a state waiver from the California Fire Marshal before restarting the pipeline, despite federal regulators asserting oversight of the project.
For Sable, “this is a huge setback,” Linda Krop, chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Center, one of the organizations challenging Sable’s restart permissions, said after the ruling. “They were hoping to start imminently, and now they can’t.”
