Drill, baby, drill!
Since President Donald Trump was re-elected last November, he has promised that he would increase U.S. oil production to decrease the country’s reliance on foreign oil in an effort to create more jobs and decrease costs to the American consumer.
But Trump’s latest move to boost oil production in the U.S. has upset one of his biggest political rivals — California Governor Gavin Newsom.
As seen in draft maps obtained by The Washington Post, the Trump administration is planning to open the California coast to oil drilling lease sales for the first time in decades.
According to the report, Trump’s plan proposes six offshore lease sales between 2027 and 2030 along the California coast.
But the move has already been met with swift criticism from Trump’s Democratic rival.
Newsom told reporters last week that Trump’s proposal was “dead on arrival.”
“Over our dead body. Period. Full Stop,” Newsom said, when asked about the plan.
President Donald Trump, Newsom added, “wants to open up the coast of California to oil drilling, but he has no interest in opening up oil drilling rigs right off the coast of Florida, not right across the street from Mar-a-Lago.”
“It’s never going to happen,” Newsom added.
Offshore drilling is “expensive and risky” and would put coastal economies at risk, Newsom spokesman Anthony Martinez said in a statement.
However, industry experts believe drilling in California would been a boon.
Ten oil and energy groups, led by the American Petroleum Institute, jointly stated in a June letter that all areas “with the potential to generate jobs, new revenue, and additional production to advance America’s energy dominance should be considered for inclusion.”
Their letter defended potential new drilling near California, noting the history of oil production in areas leased more than 50 years ago. “Undiscovered resources could be readily produced given the array of existing infrastructure in the area, particularly in southern California,” the letter said.
The offshore oil plan, which would remain in place for five years once finalized, comes in addition to a raft of offshore oil lease auctions approved in President Donald Trump’s sweeping 2025 budget legislation. That includes 30 lease auctions in the Gulf of Mexico over the next 15 years and six off the Alaska coast in the next decade.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta stated in June to resist offshore oil drilling, joining attorneys general in nine other states in opposing drilling on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
“President Trump is once again taking action to line the pockets of his Big Oil friends. This time, he’s expanding oil and gas development by attempting to drill in our coastal communities,” Bonta said at the time.
“We won’t stand idly by as the President continues to ignore science.”
Whether energy companies would ultimately be interested in drilling in these new areas remains unclear. The federal government has not held lease sales on the Pacific Coast since the 1980s.
The Trump administration is pushing firms to expand domestic drilling operations. But some companies worry prices will not be high enough to make such expansions profitable.
“In many of these areas, there has been so little exploration in recent decades that it is hard to tell what the viable resource base would even be,” said Ben Cahill, an energy markets scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. “It is an open question whether companies would be interested.”
Despite the proposal, Cahill cautioned that open California to new oil exploration would be an entirely different undertaking compared to already-existing sites in the Gulf and other areas.
“Even in federal offshore waters, you still need to get products to market. You would have to build infrastructure that is not readily available like it is in the gulf,” Cahill said.
Cahill added that companies are likely to think very carefully about drilling in California at a time when so many resources remain available along the coast of states that support offshore drilling.
Do not count on drilling in California happening overnight.
Insiders say Trump’s draft proposal is probably at least a year away from final approval, and any new production would take several more years.